Villanova stamps self as one of greats
Wildcats dominated sport all season long
SAN ANTONIO – First Mikal Bridges, then Omari Spellman emerged from the hugs and the confetti and ran toward the section behind the baseline where Villanova students were celebrating a national championship that played out more like a coronation. As Bridges and Spellman, then more teammates came over to salute their fellow students, hundreds of them in blue shirts all raised their arms, flashing two fingers.
But for this Villanova team — entirely different in personality and purpose from the one that won a breakthrough title in 2016 — the number that will resonate in history isn’t two. It’s 17.7, which will now be entered into evidence for Villanova’s argument not just as a national champion, but an alltime great college team.
That was Villanova’s victory margin for the NCAA tournament and essentially the margin by which it finished its rampage through the bracket Monday, beating Michigan 79-62 in a game that felt over by the first media timeout of the second half.
Like it did this entire tournament, and really the whole season, Villanova smashed the ever-popular narrative that the one-and-done phenomenon had thrown college basketball into an era of parity in which more teams than ever had the chance to win a national
championship.
In fact, there was only one. And if you played this tournament over again 20 times, it would be hard to conceive of a different outcome.
“When you look at the whole package, they have experience, which is rare in college basketball, shooters at every position, passers at every position and defenders,” Michigan coach John Beilein said. “We were trying to find, who’s the weak guy we can pick on? There’s a couple guys that aren’t as strong as others, but it’s a tremendous basketball team. That team could win a lot of Final Fours, not just 2018.”
Trying to compare champions across eras, or even years, is tricky business in college basketball. From the mid-1990s through 2005, the best high school players went straight to the NBA. Then for the last decade-plus, they’ve come to college for a year and largely clustered at schools such as Kentucky and Duke. The all-time great teams of the 1970s and ’80s are impossible to compare because they were built with grown men who played three and four years of college basketball.
But at least in recent history, only two teams felt as inevitable as Villanova.
One was 2009 North Carolina, which brought back the core of a Final Four team from the year before with Danny Green, Tyler Hansbrough and Ty Lawson as upperclassmen and Tyler Zeller and Ed Davis coming on board as freshmen. The Tar Heels started as preseason No. 1, never dropped out of the top five all season and didn’t have to break a sweat in the NCAA tournament, winning every game by double figures. The only knock on their résumé, and it’s a small one, was losing to Florida State in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament semifinals.
The other team in that category was Florida’s second consecutive title in 2007, which only occurred thanks to Joakim Noah, Al Horford and Corey Brewer all bypassing the NBA draft — a phenomenon that, rest assured, will never happen again.
On the merits of its season and the dominance of its championship run — Villanova won every one of its postseason games going back to the Big East tournament by double figures — they absolutely belong in the conversation.
Villanova started the season 13-0, finished 36-4, had a Ken Pomeroy offensive rating that was five points better per 100 possessions than anyone else’s in the country and didn’t lose a game when they had their full roster available.
The merits of Villanova’s argument as not just a great team but a historic one are rock solid.
But in another sense, this Villanova championship goes into a category all of its own because of the context in which it occurred.
For the past several years, everyone in college basketball has been flailing around, searching for the formula that leads to success in an era when recruiting the most talented players means the roster will turn over year after year. Lately, those teams have struggled to achieve greatness in the postseason, and programs with fewer NBA prospects but more continuity have generally risen above them.
That trend has given rise to a binary theory of college basketball where the best teams are perceived to be weaker than their counterparts in previous years, the results more random. Even Villanova, as talented as it is, does not have a surefire NBA star or even a top-10 draft pick (Bridges, according to most of the projections, will be on the fringe of that group). But at some point this season, Villanova didn’t seem like a team that would be vulnerable to the typical NCAA tournament randomness because, to be blunt, it was just so much better than everyone else.
“I don’t think these kids will think we dominated the tournament,” said Jay Wright, who is now breathing some pretty rare air with his second title. “They’ll just think, we played Villanova basketball. We did keep getting better. We got better from the Kansas game. We got better defensively tonight. That’s what they’ll take pride in.”
Understandably, it’s hard for Wright to see it the way the rest of us did. Coaches have tunnel vision, and they know what’s working today might not tomorrow. But you could go as far back as early December, when Villanova ripped through Gonzaga by 16 points in Madison Square Garden, to see what was forming.
Even when Villanova got its first loss on Dec. 30, it took Butler making 15for-22 from the three-point line to beat the Wildcats — and it was still a sixpoint game with two minutes to go.
That’s what made this team so great. Even if the Wildcats didn’t play their A game, you still had to do something special to beat them.
“I thought after the West Virginia game (in the Sweet 16), I knew we had a shot,” Wright said.
“You get into the mind-set, don’t screw this up. You’ve got a really good team here, really good kids. You’ve got a shot. And on the other side, it’s a constant struggle, don’t screw this up and then don’t be afraid to fail. It’s a struggle in your mind until three minutes to go tonight.”
That struggle is over, and the new one will now begin in the chronicles of college basketball history.