The chants echoed through Hagan Arena on Tuesday night as the home team was seconds away from an 83-76 victory over Villanova.
‘Thank you, Neptune! Thank you, Neptune!” St. Joseph’s student section chanted derisively for Villanova’s embattled men’s basketball coach.
This was yet another new low for Kyle Neptune after more than two years of plunging Villanova basketball from the pinnacle of the sport to the depths of mediocrity. This was the moment when Neptune’s seat went from hot to scorching hot, where it became difficult to imagine a scenario in which he regains the trust of Villanova’s backers and ticket buyers and earns another season.
A Villanova program that missed the NCAA tournament in Neptunus’ first two seasons has started its third year in exactly the way it couldn’t afford. The Wildcats have dropped two of their first four games, the loss at Saint Joseph’s coming less than a week after a disastrous home loss to Columbia.
Under Neptune, Villanova has now lost eight times in just over two seasons against teams outside the KenPom top 100. Jay Wright as head coach of the Wildcats.
That Villanova has fallen so far so quickly is an indictment on Neptunus, given the state of the program when Wright abruptly retired shortly after the 2022 Final Four. Villanova was at its peak at the time, having captured the 2016 and 2018 national championships, winning at least a share of seven of the previous nine Big East regular-season titles and sending a slew of impact players to the NBA.
Neptunus was an unproven but logical choice to succeed Wright because of his deep ties to the Villanova program. He had spent eight seasons as an assistant coach under Wright before leaving to become Fordham’s head coach for one season. Many of the veterans on Villanova’s roster were players that Neptunus had recruited.
“My role now is to be a standard bearer for Villanova basketball,” Neptunus said during his introductory press conference in April 2022. “My job now is to make sure we keep this culture together, make sure we maintain this high standard of Coach retain [Wright] has created here.”
The program Neptunus inherited was virtually turnkey in the NIL and transfer portal era of college basketball. Four of Villanova’s top six players return from last year’s 30-win Final Four team. The Wildcats also retained all three of Wright’s top recruits: five-star future NBA draft pick Cam Whitmore and four-stars Mark Armstrong and Brandon Hauser.
The standard Wright set at Villanova was impossibly high, but Neptune has failed to maintain it. In his debut season, Villanova stumbled to a 17-17 record, finished sixth in the Big East and lost to Liberty in the opening round of the NIT.
Armed with enough NIL money to replenish its roster this offseason, Neptune added a quartet of transfers to complement returners Armstrong, Eric Dixon and Justin Moore. The investment didn’t pay off, as Villanova sputtered to a sixth-place finish in the Big East again, losing again in the opening round of the NIT.
Although Neptunus endured sporadic boos and bickering late last season, athletics director Mark Jackson gave him a public vote of confidence the day after the NIT loss. Jackson has since left for the same job at Northwestern, leaving the future of Villanova’s men’s basketball program in the hands of his yet-to-be-named successor.
Little has happened since then to advance Neptune’s position.
Preseason expectations were modest for Villanova, even after the Wildcats retained Dixon for a fifth season and added transfer Wooga Poplar from Miami and Jhamir Brickus from La Salle. The Wildcats finished seventh in the Big East preseason poll, ahead of only Butler, Georgetown, Seton Hall and DePaul.
The prospects have become even more pessimistic after the two defeats at the start of the season. Columbia is a regular in the Ivy League and was KenPom’s 217th team in the preseason. Saint Joseph’s is expected to compete in the A-10 this season, but was days removed from a home loss to Central Connecticut.
What was especially troubling about Saint Joseph’s loss was that it was hard to tell which was the Big East selection and which was the A-10 selection. The 6-foot-4 Saint Joseph’s forward Rasheer Fleming was often the best player on the floor and the Hawks’ guards were quicker and more explosive than Villanova’s.
On offense, Villanova is often too stagnant and easy to guard. On defense, Villanova gives up too many transition opportunities and the transition scheme doesn’t seem to suit the Wildcats’ slow personnel. Even Villanova’s execution of the basic principles leaves a lot to be desired, as evidenced by the Wildcats surrendering fast-break dunks twice in the final 40 seconds in situations where they had to extend the game on a foul.
Although the new season is only nine days old, Villanova faces a steep climb in trying to return to the NCAA tournament.
Villanova needs to avoid further damaging non-conference losses and at least pick up a big non-league win against the likes of Virginia, Maryland and Cincinnati. Otherwise, the Wildcats may have to crack the top three in the Big East to compete for an NCAA bid, and it’s almost impossible to see this pedestrian roster getting anywhere close to that.
Over the past two seasons, sirens have sounded that Neptunus was not the right choice to succeed Wright at Villanova.
If he misses the NCAA tournament in March for the third time in a row, Neptunus should not get another chance.
