There won’t be a Villanova-St. Joe’s Big 5 title game this season, but Penn earned its final berth

The scene Friday at Drexel was one that wasn’t supposed to happen, at least for some people.

When the Big 5’s organizers rearranged the pods for this season, they knew they were taking a risk. Splitting St. Joseph’s and Villanova took away a guaranteed contest of the city’s most famous rivalry for the first time since the 1997-98 season, but opened the door for an even bigger matchup in the title game.

At the time the decision was made — and that time was before last season’s Big 5 Classic, when the word first got out — there were enough reasons to believe the title game clash would happen.

Sure, Villanova was down, but not far enough down to not be favored against Temple and La Salle. Steve Donahue wasn’t gone from Penn yet, Billy Lange was far from gone from St. Joe’s, TJ Power was still at Virginia, and Xzayvier Brown was still on Hawk Hill.

Shuffling the pods really felt like two things at the time. A St. Joe’s-Penn-Drexel pod made the Hawks clear favorites on paper, while a Villanova-Temple-La Salle pod guaranteed the schools with the two biggest fan bases would face off. As long as the Hawks made the final, a matchup with Villanova or Temple would be intriguing — and good for the box office, too.

By the time the season tipped off, the scene looked totally different. And when the Hawks walked out of the Palestra on Monday on the losing end, the dream final was halfway to going up in smoke.

» READ MORE: With Matt Hodge and Duke Brennan, Villanova’s versatility in the frontcourt is showing

St. Joe’s needed a Drexel win, which would have left all three teams at 1-1. The tiebreaker is the NCAA’s NET rating, the first edition of which lands on Dec. 1 — the day Villanova hosts Temple in the last pod game of the season — and the Hawks would presumably have taken it. At Friday’s tipoff, they were No. 151 in Ken Pomeroy’s rankings to Drexel’s 249 and Penn’s 265.

Now the die is officially cast. Led by Power and Ethan Roberts, Penn never trailed against Drexel and ended up rolling to an 84-68 win at the Daskalakis Athletic Center. Roberts scored 30 points for his third 20-plus game of the year, and his second straight with 30; and Power continued to show his talents with 18.

The crowd on Market Street was lively and bipartisan, announced as 1,984 — a few hundred short of a full house, and not far from the lowly 2,384 crowd at St. Joe’s-Penn on Monday. Drexel’s student section turned out well, and at one point unfurled an old-fashioned rollout mocking Penn’s students for not showing up at the Palestra.

They had a point, and would have in many past years, too. But for this night, the atmosphere felt real.

“I think coming in as a transfer, you don’t completely understand the Big 5 hype until you play in those games,” said Power, whose former Duke teammate Jared McCain was in the stands with the Sixers off. “These past two games have been some of the most intense games I’ve played in, and for us to get to that championship [final] in coach’s first year, it’s a real feeling, I think. I’m looking forward to playing in that championship game.”

» READ MORE: Meet Temple guard Gavin Griffiths, who got the nickname ‘LeBron Frames.’ Here’s why.

The action was not just intense, but good quality for two teams still getting to know themselves. Penn shot 50% from the floor and Drexel shot 42.2%. That doesn’t always happen in the City Series, a fact some long-timers might not want to admit while reminiscing about the old days.

(This writer, for example, has been scarred for 21 years by the 2004 Temple-Villanova game at the Palestra: a 53-52 Owls win where the teams missed a combined 80 of 120 shots.)

Does missing out on a St. Joe’s-Villanova final mean the risk wasn’t worth taking? The ticket sales for the Big 5 Classic on Dec. 6 will offer one verdict, and fans can decide if they want to offer another.

If there isn’t going to be a full round-robin, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with the principle of changing up the pods from time to time. This season was the first time that happened, and it’s expected that the new groups will run for two years as the first set did.

» READ MORE: Shayla Smith is adjusting to college basketball at Penn State after record-setting high school career

Was there a way to keep St. Joe’s and Villanova together in the first change? There weren’t many moves to make, since St. Joe’s and La Salle have to stay separate being in the same conference.

A St. Joe’s-Temple-Villanova pod obviously would not make sense. So the only other option besides the move they settled on — swapping Villanova and Drexel — would have put Villanova, St. Joe’s, and Drexel together. That would have sent the Wildcats to the city’s smallest gym in one of the two years, which felt unlikely this early in the pod system.

So it was understandable that the people in charge tried. A little uncertainty is no bad thing anyway, as it livens up the early-season slate. And though the Big 5 still feels stratified, the pod format also heightens the stakes of each game. One loss can tip the whole thing, as just happened to the Hawks.

It could happen again if Temple upsets Villanova on the Main Line. That would give us a ‘Nova-St. Joe’s game after all, just in the third-place game.

» READ MORE: ‘She’s a force’: How King of Prussia’s Megan Griffith built Columbia into an Ivy League powerhouse

What the final will look like is a different question, but that’s not Penn’s problem for now. Coach Fran McCaffery, Power, and the rest can celebrate just getting there — and laying down a strong marker to start McCaffery’s tenure at his alma mater.

“When you come into a season, there are certain things that you hope to be able to accomplish collectively, and that clearly is one,” he said. “I think everybody knows the respect I have for the Big 5 and its history, and also for the level of talent and coaching in all the teams. We just beat two really good teams, two really well-coached teams, and then we’ll get to play another one.”

This time, it will be on the city’s biggest stage.