Villanova’s Big East tournament loss to Georgetown will have Selection Sunday ramifications

NEW YORK — With a towel draped over his head in a quiet Villanova locker room, Tyler Perkins assessed the carnage of the Wildcats’ 78-64 loss to Georgetown, the last-place team in the Big East, in a conference tournament quarterfinal at Madison Square Garden.

“We weren’t there mentally,” the junior guard said.

Next to him, a few moments earlier, Devin Askew gave a similar opinion.

“They beat us,” Askew, the conference’s sixth man of the year, said after shooting 1-for-9 from three-point range. “We didn’t come out to play.”

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It was the simplest explanation for what happened, and it was backed up by the box score. Georgetown, which had a seven-game losing streak before winning its regular-season finale and its first-round matchup against DePaul, out-rebounded Villanova, 46-25. The Hoyas had as many offensive rebounds (16) as Villanova did defensive rebounds.

Villanova (24-8) shot just 24.1% on its 29 three-point shots and 37.7% overall. Freshman point guard Acaden Lewis had one of his worst performances of the season, finishing with just five points on 2-for-9 shooting and three assists. Duke Brennan led Villanova with 14 points but got dominated on the glass and turned it over three times.

The Wildcats scored just two points over the final 6 minutes, 45 seconds of the first half and shot 1-for-12 to during that stretch to enter halftime trailing by four, 35-31, after a 14-2 Georgetown run.

“I thought a little bit of our offense late in the first half dictated a little bit of our defense, and that was probably our first time all year that our offense kind of shifted to our defense instead of the other way around,” Villanova coach Kevin Willard said.

A quiet crowd by Big East tournament standards was finally loud around the time Askew hit a three-pointer to cut the deficit to 51-49 with more than 12 minutes to go, but Georgetown, without its leading scorer, KJ Lewis, rallied with a 16-4 run over the next seven minutes to put the game away.

That run was capped by consecutive Kayvaun Mulready three-pointers from the corner in front of the Georgetown bench. After each make, he celebrated by flapping his arms like wings.

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Look closer and you could see a No. 7 seed — Villanova’s average seeding among the majority of NCAA Tournament projections — flying away into the New York night. The Wildcats may have gotten shellacked by St. John’s in this building less than two weeks ago in a 32-point defeat, but this loss may have been worse.

It’s of the full seed line variety, which is a big deal that will become obvious when the brackets come out on Sunday night. The difference between a No. 7 and a No. 8, or even a No. 9, where the Wildcats could end up, is huge. It means playing a better team in the opening game, and then playing a No. 1 seed instead of a No. 2 seed in the Round of 32 should you win the first one.

It lowers the chance of sneaking into the second weekend.

That’s the mathematical part of it, though. The eyes have revealed enough. The Wildcats haven’t been their best when the lights are brightest, and they aren’t getting any darker. They have a signature road win over Wisconsin in December, one that got better with age. But every step up in competition, or, in Thursday night’s case, any raising of the stakes, has provided a reality check.

“I think when you have a young basketball team that has played really well all year long and has had some struggles in big games, that’s part of the growing process and the learning process,” Willard said. “That doesn’t stop you from boxing out, though.”

Therein lies the two-sided coin of this Villanova season. It is a young team that played above its expectations. The Wildcats were picked seventh in the conference and finished third. They won 24 games and are a shoo-in to return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2022. But a streak from 2022 continued because Willard’s team, which is short-handed without starting power forward Matt Hodge, made too many mistakes in a game it couldn’t afford to.

For the fourth consecutive Friday night at the Big East tournament, the semifinals will go on without Villanova.

“We just got to let it make us hungry, let it fuel us, and just understand that’s what’s going to happen if we don’t come to play,” Perkins said. “We get another chance in the tournament to redeem ourselves.”

For now, there’s at least one more chance.

“We have to let this go, learn from it, learn that this time of year is one game at a time,” Askew said. “If you lose, you go home, just like we’re going home right now.”