Jay Wright and Villanova Primed to Join The Elite

In College Basketball, there are teams that you know are going to be a factor every year. UNC, Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, UCLA and so on. Historically, those teams have always been there, but there are always teams who join their ranks year after year for an extended period of time. UConn, Florida, Texas, Michigan State.

Fresh off the first Final Four appearance in over 2 decades, Jay Wright and Villanova seem primed to enter that group.

Of course, that’s just an empty homer pipe dream without any proof or evidence, but luckily that’s what we love to do here.

I have 3 reasons why I believe Nova is at the beginning at what could be very long run near the top of the basketball world.

1. The Best is Yet to Come

When you talk about College Basketball, you first have to look at recruiting and see what kind of talent the coaches are bringing in. The recruiting services are extremely in-depth in their analysis of high school players and they are really good at predicting what kind of impact players can have in college.

The chart below shows every Villanova player on last year’s team, every player on the current team, and the players committed to Nova who are still in high school. I have used a simple average of how the players were rated by the 3 major recruiting services to rank the level of talent we are looking at.

The bolded players are players with 3 or more years of eligibility left, or the future of the program. The italicized players are currently on the team.

The top six recruits on this list have at least 2 years remaining with the program, 4 of them haven’t even played a game yet. Every single incoming recruit was ranked in the top 100 by at least one service. The top recruit on this list isn’t a guard, but a skilled 6′10” center. Of the top 10 players on this list, only 3 were on the Final Four team last year, and the other 7 will start their Nova career’s either this year, or shortly thereafter. Long story short – we were stacked last year, but not as stacked as we are going to be.

2. Pick a Team, Any Team

So looking at Nova in a vacuum is great, but that doesn’t mean looking at 30 other programs in a vacuum is great as well. I wanted to compare Nova’s level of talent moving forward against the premier programs in the country. I figured the best programs as: Duke, UNC, UCLA, Kentucky, Kansas, Michigan St., UConn, Florida and Texas. Since there is only one Big East power in there, I added Louisville, Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Georgetown as well. Also, since I wanted to show the difference between these teams and a “normal” BCS-League squad, I threw Notre Dame in there, since I am familiar with them.

What these rankings are…

I took those 15 programs and looked at their current roster. I only looked at players with 2 years of eligibility left or more (the future of the programs), including committed high school players. I then looked at their Rivals rankings and separated them into 3 groups: Players ranked in the top-50 (generally 5 stars and high-4 stars), players ranked from 50-150 (generally 4 stars) and players ranked lower than 150 (generally 3 stars). Since each team had a different numbers of players meeting this criteria, I ranked them by average stars (5, 4, 3 for each category respectively) instead of total talent. The results are as follows (I apologize for the so-so quality. I don’t apologize for the awesome use of team colors).

These rankings represent the 2007-2011 high school classes, so the current college juniors all the way to the current high school juniors. So how many teams will have a higher concentration of talent  over the next several years? Only 4: Kentucky, UCLA, UNC and Texas. You could point out that both Kansas and Florida have more top-150 players, but Nova still has some spaces to fill, and they are already high on the list of the #1 overall player in the 2011 class, Mike Gilchrist, and the #4 overall player, Rakeem Christmas, among others. And none of this is even mentioning the Big East, where Nova is clearly the cream of the crop.

3. Coach Clooney

You can recruit all you want, but you still have to win on the court. While the teams with the best talent tend to be in the mix at the end, the teams with the best coaches are there year after year. In the last 5 years, Jay Wright’s Villanova teams have gone 126-45. More impressively though, they have gone 11-5 in the NCAA tourny and reached the Sweet 16 in 4 of those years. The only teams in the 15 mentioned above that reached the Sweet 16 in four of the last five years are UNC and UCLA. That’s it. So the performance has been there with lesser talent, you would assume Jay Wright’s teams will only get better with better talent.

Without even seeing performance, you can see Wright’s coaching acumen on the court whenever Nova plays. They are a joy to watch because each and every one of them are relentless on the defensive end (see Elite 8 performance against Pitt last season) and they do not give up until the final buzzer sounds (see the December 6th, 2007 game against LSU). Meanwhile, their offensive talents aren’t lost on Wright and they have the ability to outscore teams as well. It’s not coincidence that Wright’s name comes up whenever a big-time position (like Kentucky) comes up, or even when an NBA job comes up (like the Sixers). There are very, very few coaches I would rather have at Villanova.

Wright is under contract through the 2012-2013 season, and I would start saving for a huge extension that would really make him forget about even thinking about going anywhere else.

Conclusion

So that’s it. We made the Final Four last year, but we’ve got better talent coming in, and one of the best coaches in the country leading the way with no sign of letting up on the recruiting trail. I truly believe Villanova is about to embark on the best string of basketball the city has ever seen. The pieces are in place, let’s see what happens.

November 11, 2009