Mark Ferrante made Villanova into a regular playoff contender. Can it advance past the second round?

On Wednesday morning, coach Mark Ferrante walked off the field at Villanova Stadium after wrapping practice in preparation for the team’s game against Lehigh in the second round of the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) playoffs.

He wore his usual visor with a smile, but missing was his plastic toothpick, which normally sticks out of the side of his mouth at practices.

Despite the team’s inexperience after losing over a dozen starters to graduation, Villanova demolished Harvard, 52-7, last weekend and has won nine straight. After the game, Ferrante said that his players might lack experience, but they never lacked confidence.

Ferrante, in his ninth year at the helm, and the program are no strangers to the FCS playoffs, making playoff appearances in five of the last six seasons and 17 all-time. Ferrante has been around the team since 1987, watching former head coach Andy Talley build the program from the ground up. That all paid off in 2009 when Villanova won its first and only FCS championship.

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However, in the last three consecutive seasons, Villanova has won its first FCS playoff game and then fallen short in the second round. Last season, Villanova traveled to San Antonio, Texas, to face a sixth-seeded Incarnate Word in the second round. The Wildcats held an Incarnate Word team, which averaged 38 points per game, to 13, but still lost, 13-6.

Now, Villanova is back in the second round, and Ferrante is tasked with guiding his team over that hurdle on Saturday.

Villanova’s Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) contest — which was against Penn State this season — and tough Coastal Athletic Association (CAA) conference matchups helped prepare the Wildcats to play into December, but that could be beneficial to any team.

For Villanova, specifically, going as far as it can in playoffs will come down to limiting injuries.

“Sometimes it comes down to the health of the team,” Ferrante said. “If you look at last year against Incarnate Word, we’re playing a ton of freshmen [defensive backs] in that game by the time we got to that point of the season. So right now, we’re better than we were a year ago when it comes to the health of the team. I’m not looking to make excuses, because you have to go 1-0 each week. And this idea is to survive and advance.”

Over the course of this season, Villanova has lost starters intermittently due to injuries.

Notably, standout running back David Avit has missed the last three consecutive games with a knee injury. Ja’briel Mace and Isaiah Ragland stepped up with no issue, both rushing for career-highs during that stretch. Mace even shattered the program’s 24-year-old single-game rushing record.

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On the defensive side, the team started the season without graduate linebacker Richie Kimmel and lost junior linebacker JR Strauss after the game against Penn State.

In comparison, during Villanova’s 2009 championship season, it lost one notable starter to an injury.

While injuries are uncontrollable, execution is not, Ferrante said.

“The bottom line is, it has to come down to execution,” Ferrante said. “You have to go out and perform at a high level regardless of who you’re playing, regardless of the weather conditions, regardless of the health of your team.”

While Ferrante has experienced the last three seasons of playoff football, he is not the only one familiar with it all. Graduate linebacker Shane Hartzell has played in all of Villanova’s playoff games these past three seasons.

“The experience of Shane, I’m sure [the vets] talk to guys behind the scenes,” Ferrante said. “I think we have a good locker room right now. So I think there’s a lot of that going on that we really don’t even see as coaches, but it’s their practice habits that help as well. You have guys that just go out there and practice hard all the time, and that filters down into the young guys.

“So now you see some of our younger guys are having fairly good success. They see how practice is supposed to be, and then they follow suit, and then they end up becoming pretty good players.”

It has become a standard for Villanova to retain players for four years or sometimes even longer. Ten of Villanova’s starters last season were five-year players.

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“We just try to set a standard of being good students, good athletes, and good people,” Ferrante said. “Just work hard, be a good person, make good decisions, and good things will happen. That’s our approach when it comes to the classroom. That’s our approach when it comes to practice and playing. If you have a good locker room and you have a team that could lead themselves a little bit, there’s not a lot of drama. There aren’t a lot of things that end up in my office that I have to deal with.”

As college football coaches will go around a merry-go-round of different programs, Ferrante has not moved an inch from the Main Line, and that looks to be the case well into the future.

“If you love what you do, you love where you do it, and you love the people you do it with, and that’s a win,” Ferrante said. “And that’s what this place has been for me.”