Run a quick search for “does Villanova deserve a No. 1 seed,” and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 results will come up. Almost all of them are from February or March of last year. A large number of these results include headlines that ask other rhetorical questions. “How good is Villanova, really?” “What do we know about Villanova?” “Is this Villanova team for real?”
Should we trust Villanova basketball this season?
The Villanova Wildcats are winning and losing in a fashion that’s eerily similar to last season’s squad. So why should we have more faith in this team than that one?
Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
Start preparing your answers to all of these questions again.
The comparison is simple, but too in your face to ignore, and the first half of Villanova’s eventual 78-58 loss to Georgetown wasn’t even over before hoards of folks on Twitter were making it.
A season ago, Villanova ripped through the regular season, going 28-3 overall and 16-2 in the Big East before a heartbreaking one-point loss to Seton Hall in its first conference tournament game. The issue? The Wildcats were destroyed in their two regular season conference defeats, falling to hot-shooting Creighton by a ridiculous combined total of 197-148. Elite teams are allowed to lose, especially when the team doing the beating is also a top 15 squad, but the manner in which Villanova was being manhandled produced some heavy skepticism from the college hoops world (a 16-point loss to Syracuse earlier in the season didn't help either).
Despite being one of the teams in the mix for a No. 1 seed on Selection Sunday, the Wildcats became a trendy Round of 32 upset pick when the brackets designated them as the East Region’s second seed. Those predictions came to fruition when eventual national champion Connecticut sprung the “upset” via a convincing 77-65 win. Despite UConn winning four more games after that one, there was a sense that the doubters’ suspicions about Villanova had been confirmed.
Fast forward 10 months and ‘Nova is once again the team with the sparkling record and the legion of skeptics. It’s predictable, if not understandable, given the similarities to what we saw a year ago.
The Wildcats have another close loss to Seton Hall on their resume, one very impressive non-conference victory (a 24-point trouncing of VCU), and were down huge to a struggling Syracuse team before pulling off an incredible comeback. And then, of course, there’s Monday night. Jay Wright’s team was lit up from start to finish, trailing by as many as 26 before ultimately winding up on the wrong end of the most lopsided final score in the Big East so far this season. That’s not a great fact to be attributed to the league’s team that was supposed to be in a class of its own.
Villanova’s record was impossible to mock last season, but four of those 29 wins were overtime games that could have just as easily been losses. Does that mean they were overrated? Maybe. Does it mean they were a team loaded with winners that just had the misfortune of running up against a squad that was better than everyone over the course of the season’s final three weeks? Maybe.
Here's the thing: just about everybody loses in January, and often times it isn't pretty. Villanova's 2008-09 team lost three out of five during one stretch in January, and also took a 21-point beatdown at the hands of West Virginia in mid-February. That squad ended its season in the Final Four, and never had to deal with any sort of overrated talk since its conference was in the process of producing three No. 1 seeds. The college basketball narrative isn't always consistent.
The truth is that the eerie similarities between this year’s Villanova team and last year’s probably don’t mean too much, but they’re going to be too obvious and juicy for the college hoops world to ignore. When history repeats itself on the court, it’s always going to repeat itself in the media, which means Nova Nation is going to have to do a lot of sticking up for itself over the course of the next two months. That’s all well and good, but the reality is the only thing that’s going to change the perception of the Wildcats in the eyes of some is a successful run in the big dance.
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