Why does the college basketball world love to sleep on Villanova?

With a record of 138-17, no Division-I men’s basketball program has won more since the 2013-14 season than Villanova. The Wildcats won the 2016 national championship and were the No. 1 overall seed in the 2017 NCAA tournament. Jay Wright’s team is currently 9-0 and ranked No. 4 in the AP Top 25 poll.

If Duke were the program in question here, it’d be silly to start any post by listing those facts. And if we were talking about Kentucky or North Carolina? Those numbers and accomplishments would have been drilled into all of our heads.

So why is Villanova still different? Why do the Wildcats remain the team we love to, at best, undervalue and, at worst, forget about entirely?

Now some of you may read this and respond: “But we don’t forget about Villanova. We hear about them all the time. I know how good the Wildcats are, I know how good they’ve been, I can tell you a little bit about Jalen Brunson’s game. What are we talking about here?”

We’re not talking about you. We’re talking about why the Wildcats get less air time on national debate shows than Duke, Michigan State, North Carolina, Kansas, and Kentucky. We’re talking about why posts centered around Villanova pull in less traffic than said fellow national powerhouses. We’re talking about why if you went up to a random person in a sports bar, there’d probably be better than a 50 percent chance that they couldn’t give you a general idea of what type of team Jay Wright has this season.

So back to the question at hand: Why?

One easy answer is that, unlike Duke and Kentucky, Villanova isn’t loaded with talent destined for the NBA draft lottery (although if his performance so far this season is any indication, Mikal Bridges may be about to change that). Ryan Arcidiacono did everything you could ask a college guard to do, Darrun Hilliard was a first-team All-Big East performer, and Josh Hart was a worthy first-team All-American and National Player of the Year finalist. That said, none of those guys significantly moved the needle for the type of fan who occasionally checks out college hoops in order to keep tabs on the future stars of the professional game.

This seems too simple. North Carolina hasn’t exactly been overflowing with NBA talent the way Duke and Kentucky have in recent years. Gonzaga and Wichita State still draw significant interest despite not being among the elite of the elite in the world of recruiting.

The more likely culprit when it comes to Villanova’s perpetual state of undervalue is the television contract its conference has with Fox Sports.

We still live in a world where when the average American feels the urge to watch live sports, they flip to ESPN. They see if anything interesting is on the worldwide leader or one of its surrounding networks, and they work from there. If Villanova and Xavier are playing a Tuesday night thriller on FS1, for most people it’s going to take a prompt from some outside party to get them over there.

The good news for the Big East is that their television situation is getting better. While regular-season viewership across the country was down in 2016-17, Big East basketball viewership on FS1 and FS2 was up 16 percent from the 2015-16 and up 84 percent from the league’s first year.

That increase last season resulted in an average Big East viewership of 192,000 viewers per game. The issue is that the “down” numbers for CBS were an average of 1.4 million viewers per game last season, and 1.2 million viewers per game over at ESPN. That is a significant gap, which is especially unfortunate when you consider that the current state of the Big East is much, much stronger than most were predicting five years ago.

The gap doesn’t solely explain how a 30+ win team from a perennially strong program that exists in a part of the country that loves college basketball can keep “sneaking” up on us every March, but it helps.

On Tuesday night, Villanova got a rare opportunity to play a fellow top-15 opponent in a nationally televised game on ESPN. They took full advantage. Bridges and Phil Booth combined to score 48 points as Villanova shot 51.8 percent from the field as a team and torched No. 12 Gonzaga in the first game of the Jimmy V Classic, 88-72.

That’s right. First game.

You see, even though Villanova and Gonzaga are both ranked in the top 12, even though they have each appeared in one of the last two national title games, and even though one of them is a program located in the Pacific time zone, the clash on Tuesday night was still relegated to undercard status inside Madison Square Garden.

Top billing went to old Big East rivals Syracuse and Connecticut. That’s unranked Syracuse, a team picked to finish 10th in the ACC at the start of the season. Versus unranked Connecticut, a team whose most interesting second-half storyline seems destined to be whether or not Kevin Ollie will be the Huskies’ head coach in 2018-19.

Just another notch in the “us against the world” belt that Nova Nation never thought it’d need to fasten its pants with.

Ultimately, none of this really matters. The lack of attention doesn’t change the fact that through the first month of the season, Villanova looks like it might be the most complete team in the country. The lack of TV time doesn’t diminish Bridges’ star turn, or the continuing emergence freshman Omari Spellman, who gives Nova the elite frontcourt presence it desperately needed during last season’s tournament loss to Wisconsin. The excessive attention paid to those ranked immediately above or below the Wildcats won’t keep Nova from once again flirting with 30 regular-season wins, and it won’t stop them from being one of the central figures of March Madness.

If the world is talking about Villanova then, that’ll be enough.