Sielski: 'Nova's quiet bubble could be a big edge
While the rest of Philadelphia was sweating over whether the Eagles would promote Paul Turner from the practice squad to the active roster, I walked into the Pavilion on Thursday to watch the defending NCAA men's basketball champions practice.
The Villanova Wildcats begin their regular season Friday night against Lafayette, and as coach Jay Wright put his players through a free-throw drill to complete their workout, I stood there alone and watched them. There were no TV cameras, no other writers. Everyone else had gotten their stories and their sound over the previous few days. From the Pavilion lobby, just listening, you'd have thought 10 fraternity brothers were playing pickup. It was that quiet.
"Just like we like it," assistant coach Baker Dunleavy said.
I mention this not to suggest that the rest of the town's sports media members are lazy (which they're not) or to reveal that I'm a procrastinator (which I am). I mention it to point out a dynamic, unique to Villanova among college basketball's elite programs, that might make it easier for the Wildcats to do the thing that none of them - neither Wright nor any of his assistants and players - wants to discuss: repeating.
Now, it's unrealistic to think the Wildcats will win a second consecutive championship, mostly because only one school (Florida) has done it since 1993 and there will be too many variables at play once the 2017 tournament begins. What will their seed be? Their draw? How healthy will they be? What if they get a bad matchup? So much has to go right, and so much of it just did last March.
That said, it's certainly possible that Villanova could win again. The Wildcats are ranked third in the USA Today Coaches Poll, and among their returning players are two stars from last season's team, Josh Hart and Kris Jenkins. They have the talent to do it, and they have an advantage that other powerhouses don't share. They live in a protective bubble of relative indifference. It's practically pressure free, compared with Duke, North Carolina, Kansas. It's the beauty of being a great college program in a pro sports city.
"Definitely. Definitely. Absolutely," Wright said Thursday. "It's the greatest thing about this job. It really is. I've said that all along. There are a lot of great things about this job, but this is definitely one of them. You can be a normal person."
Some of his contemporaries can't. Say Kentucky happens to lose an SEC game at Rupp Arena on a Saturday afternoon. You know where John Calipari will be from Saturday night until Monday morning? He'll be in Florida, on a beach, because if he stays in Lexington, he won't be able to take his wife to dinner. He won't be able to leave his house or his office.
Wright has no worries in that regard. As an assistant coach at UNLV, under Rollie Massimino, in the early 1990s, he'd routinely see three camera crews and two newspaper reporters at every practice. "It was their pro team," Wright said. Villanova is not Philadelphia's pro team, not even close, and the players, too, enjoy "keeping it low key," as Hart said Thursday.
If you think this more relaxed environment doesn't matter, that it doesn't benefit Villanova in any regard, try a thought experiment. Think back to the fall of 2008, when the Phillies went on their World Series run. The conventional wisdom then, as Cole Hamels threw one shutout inning after another and Matt Stairs sent one deep into the night and Brad Lidge closed out each game, was that, after 25 years without a pro championship to celebrate, Philadelphia would react with a great expulsion of joy and relief. All we needed was one team to break through, to pop that balloon of frustration and heartache, and a newfound forbearance would wash over everyone. Hey, man. Don't get on Donovan so much, man. We're still world champions of baseball!
Yeah, not so much.
The pressure didn't decrease. It intensified. We'd had a taste, and we wanted more, and for several years thereafter, the four major franchises redoubled their efforts to win a championship quickly. The Phillies started spending on player salaries like they'd never spent before. The Eagles created "The Dream Team." The Flyers kept retooling, as they did often throughout the final years of Ed Snider's ownership. The Sixers bet on Andrew Bynum and lost. Only recently, after those failures, have the franchises embarked on more deliberate rebuilding plans and have more fans come to accept the need to be patient.
Wright and the Wildcats are different. They have enjoyed, deservedly so, the spoils of that magnificent tournament run and Jenkins' thrilling buzzer-beater, and one of those rewards is a season of good feelings. If they lose in an early-season upset, if they get bounced from the Big East tournament or by a 15th seed in Buffalo, the complaints and what-ifs will be too faint to hear. It's just the way of college basketball here, even for the defending national champs. Don't think for a second that Cal or Coach K wouldn't kill to experience it themselves.
@MikeSielski