Has Villanova’s winning streak opened the door for new NCAA Tournament seeding? Yes and no.

The NCAA Tournament is coming to Philadelphia for one of its eight opening-weekend sites, and Villanova made sure to plan for the occasion.

The Wildcats hosted four games at Xfinity Mobile Arena last season but scheduled only two home games there this season — the second of which is Saturday evening vs. No. 5 Connecticut. NCAA rules prohibit a team from playing tournament games in a venue where they host more than three home games, and typically the lowest seeds are rewarded geographically with first- and second-round locations.

It was rather ambitious planning for Villanova given that the Wildcats had a new coach and a new roster and hadn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2022. And it remains lofty even now, after a six-game winning streak has Villanova at 21-5 overall and 12-3 in the Big East. The Wildcats are almost guaranteed to snap that tournament drought, but they remain unlikely to get to a seed line that would have them reaping the reward of some home cooking in the first and second rounds.

“There is a path,” ESPN bracket master Joe Lunardi said Thursday when asked if Villanova could get as high as the No. 4 line, but when asked how realistic it was, Lunardi said “minimally.”

Lunardi spoke via phone from an interesting location given the subject of the conversation. He was in Indianapolis, where a mock NCAA Tournament selection exercise with media members was taking place. In his own bracket projection, Lunardi had Villanova 25th as of Thursday morning, otherwise known as the top seventh seed on his big board. The Wildcats were 28th, the lowest possible seventh seed, and slotted in Buffalo to face 10th-seeded Auburn in the first round when the mock committee went through its process Thursday, 31 days from Selection Sunday.

The mock committee ranked the top 20 seeds and placed the last four at-large teams into the field, but it used computers to seed most of the rest of the bracket. Of note, those computer models had Temple, which is tied for sixth in the American Athletic Conference, winning its conference tournament and getting into the field.

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Back to Villanova, and to Lunardi’s bracket ... not much has changed since Jan. 28, when we last caught up with him to assess the Wildcats’ tournament path. They were a No. 7 seed then, and while they moved up a few spots on the seeding line, they’re a No. 7 seed as of Thursday even after reeling off six consecutive wins following their overtime loss to UConn in Hartford on Jan. 24.

Similarly, Villanova was 34th in the NCAA’s NET rankings on Jan. 28 and 29th on Thursday. And at KenPom, the Wildcats were 27th on Jan. 28 and 27th on Thursday. That is life in the 2025-26 Big East. Six wins in a row doesn’t move the metrics much.

“They’re certainly looking the part,” Lunardi said. “The problem is, the dirty little secret, the league standing is flat if not declining.”

The mock bracket on Thursday had just three Big East teams in the field of 68: UConn, St. John’s, and Villanova.

Villanova has just three Quad 1 wins to date: Wisconsin, the road win at Seton Hall, and last Saturday’s road win at Creighton. That game was a Quad 2 game until Creighton knocked off UConn on Wednesday and moved back into the top 75 of the NET rankings. It could slip back into Quad 2 territory if Creighton moves back in the rankings. As it stands, the Wildcats have just two more chances at Quad 1 victories in the regular season: Saturday vs. UConn and next Saturday at St. John’s.

Why are those opportunities important? As of Thursday morning, the top 21 teams in the NET rankings all had four or more Quad 1 wins. NET standings don’t necessarily translate to tournament seeds, but it’s hard to imagine Villanova climbing high enough in any tournament bracket without adding another Quad 1 win in the regular season, and another one or two en route to cutting the nets down at Madison Square Garden after winning the conference tournament.

It’s not impossible, just not all that likely.

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What the winning streak has done, though, is shift the floor a little bit. As of three weeks ago, getting a No. 9 or 10 seed in the NCAA Tournament seemed just as likely as a No. 6 seed. Now, a No. 6 seems much more likely than a No. 10.

“Six is a great spot because you should win your first game and it’s not too heavy of a lift in the second game,” Lunardi said. “And you avoid the one [seed].”

“They’re going to wear white,” he said later, implying that Villanova seems like it’s on a path to be, at worst, a No. 8 seed and be the de facto “home” team in its first-round game.

Home just probably won’t be South Philly. How does a mid-March trip to Buffalo sound?