Kevin Willard’s Vision for Villanova: Multi-Year Commits, Up-Tempo Play

New Villanova men’s basketball head coach Kevin Willard appeared on CBS Sports college basketball insider Jon Rothstein’s podcast on Wednesday, May 14, discussing his first weeks on the Main Line and the associated challenges of retooling a roster in the Name, Image and Likeness era of college sports.

While Willard noted that prior to the open transfer era, he wouldn’t have needed to work so hard to replenish his roster — six of nine Wildcats players with eligibility remaining hit the portal at season’s end — the existence of the portal makes it much easier for him to rebuild a roster than he had during his time at Seton Hall in the early 2010s. He also credited his new colleagues with the Wildcats for their help.

“It’s definitely easier now, just because again the transfer portal — although it’s made everything crazy and it’s made everything really difficult — it does give you a chance to immediately solve some issues that you have with your roster,” Willard said. “Everyone in the Villanova community and family has been phenomenal. We’ve obviously been busy… really proud of my staff and the body who jumped in and just tried to put the best roster together. I think we put a really good roster together.”

Roster Continuity

Kevin Willard said he emphasized looking for athletes who can play multiple positions and will spend multiple years at Villanova, much like Jay Wright did during the Wildcats’ championship runs… although he acknowledged the difficulty of achieving that goal in the current college basketball landscape.

“Getting back to that identity of building and retaining and making sure that we have roster retention,” Willard said. “Because that’s really how Jay did it better than anybody at that time, was getting guys, three, four, five year guys, that were the culture. They were everything.”

Willard suggested one way to retain players for multiple years, even in the era of the transfer portal: presenting redshirt years as a way to make more NIL money down the line. For instance, an established star in his senior or fifth year season would pull more money than all but the most highly-recruited freshmen, making a delayed start more financially sensible.

“Kids are starting to figure this out: if I was a freshman coming in right now, and I wasn’t a top 25 kid, a top 20 kid, I’d want to redshirt. I’d want to go somewhere where I could redshirt and develop, get ready to play,” Willard said.

“Because you’re going to earn so much more money in your fifth year than you will in just four years of college. And a lot of kids — mostly agents — are looking at it, agents are advising the high school kids like ‘this is a good spot for you, I like the way they develop their kids. Let’s go there, let’s give them a two year commitment, see what happens after year two, then we’ll hit the portal and hit the bank.’”

Speeding Up the Tempo

Kevin Willard also said he wanted to focus on finding players with the versatility — although he explicitly avoided using the label of ‘positionless’ basketball — to play multiple positions.

“Everyone we tried to bring in was someone that  wasn’t a duplicate: someone that we could play multiple positions, play a lot quicker, go a lot deeper,” Willard said. “I’m excited about the roster we’ve put together. I think it’s deep and it’s young, it’s a team that we can retain and get better and build on: Nova fans can know a guy like Malachi Palmer for a couple years, see how good of a player he is, see how talented he is.”

Willard also complimented incoming freshman guards Acaden Lewis and Chris Jeffrey, who he described as “dynamite.”

The question of pace of play came up repeatedly, with Willard highlighting his desire to move at a more aggressive offensive tempo… and have that energy translate to the defensive end of the court.

“I think the biggest thing is we’re gonna play faster,” Willard said. “Just picking up the tempo a little bit and getting everybody to kind of understand the way we’re gonna play. I thought at Maryland we did a really good job of establishing tempo in my first year… get these guys to understand how hard we have to play, how hard you have to work to play fast.”

Kevin Willard’s First Thoughts on Villanova

As he did in his introductory press conference with the Wildcats, Kevin Willard waxed poetic about the enduring team culture at Villanova. Among other changes between his previous teams and Villanova, he noted that the Wildcats’ administration holds three hour long weekly meetings devoted to the success of the basketball program, brainstorming how to best navigate the current college sports landscape.

“I knew how strong this culture was just from seeing it for the 12 years at Seton Hall… but I didn’t know the brotherhood, how strong and how much the former players love this place and want this place to be great,” Willard said. “I knew how strong it was, again, from the outside. But once you get into the inside and you really start to talk to these guys and meet them and see how much they love this program and Coach Wright, it’s blown me away.”

Of the returning Wildcats, Willard said he expects to see Tyler Perkins, a defensive stalwart who primarily shot threes last season, blossom in his up-tempo style. He also complimented redshirt freshman Matthew Hodge, who he tried to recruit at Maryland.

Last but not least, Willard dropped some scheduling breadcrumbs, saying that Villanova is looking to set up multi-year home-and-home series and games at professional arenas like the Prudential Center and Barclays Center in Newark and Brooklyn, respectively.