Villanova Bracketology: Luigi Suigo’s Impact On Rankings

Villanova Men’s Basketball checked their biggest box of the offseason with the addition of incoming recruit Luigi Suigo, a 7-foot-3 Italian center who spent last season playing in the Serbian pros.

Suigo’s addition bumped the Wildcats into the No. 25 spot on CBS Sports college basketball analyst Jon Rothstein’s daily offseason rankings; they’d previously hovered just outside the top 25 as they and other teams flesh out their rosters, and could make it back into the preseason AP Poll for the first time since the 2023-24 campaign.

ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi, on the other hand, kept Villanova as a No. 7 seed in his latest way-too-early tournament assessment, published on Tuesday, June 16. Lunardi predicts the Wildcats will face NC State in the Sacramento Regional next March, a difficult draw — at least in terms of location — for the second season in a row. Analyst Andy Katz, typically one of the Wildcats’ toughest critics, hasn’t updated his Top 37 rankings since the Suigo news broke. Prior to that, he hadn’t included Villanova at all in his rankings, marking a major break with the rest.

Preseason rankings only mean so much, but reputation does matter in a sport like college basketball where those who don’t win their conference tournament outright need to wait for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament… and are at the mercy of their own national perception as a result. As Villanova attempts to recover from the struggles of the Kyle Neptune era, having a number beside their name to begin the season would mark a major stride toward the level of national respect that Wildcats fans learned to enjoy under Jay Wright.