It was only midway through the first half, but Villanova head coach Kevin Willard was already ready for a change in his coaching staff.<\/p>\n
The No. 8 Wildcats trailed No. 9 Utah State 22-16, and the Aggies had been punishing Willard\u2019s team on baseline out-of-bounds plays. And he wasn\u2019t shy about sharing his thoughts with TNT sideline reporter Lauren Shehadi in his midgame interview.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to fire my staff,\u201d Willard said midgame. \u201cWe\u2019ve given up 8 points on underneath out-of-bounds defense. The only thing I\u2019m gonna do is fire them and get a new staff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Willard told reporters after the loss that \u201cit was a joke,\u201d though he did say unprompted in his postgame conference that he was going to fire them, and only after he was asked directly about it again did he call it a joke.<\/p>\n
The frustration sprouted from real struggle. To that point, Utah State had scored 16 points in the paint. It finished with 42 down low in an 86-76 win, eliminating Willard\u2019s teams in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.<\/p>\n
\u201cWelcome to my life,\u201d the 50-year-old said. \u201cIt\u2019s a joke.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former Villanova two-time national championship-winning coach Jay Wright was in Viejas Arena in San Diego to watch the Wildcats get muscled into a first-round exit. Wright retired from coaching in 2022. Kyle Neptune took over for the next three seasons, and Villanova failed to make the tournament in any of those years.<\/p>\n
Enter Willard from Maryland in 2025. The Wildcats went 24-9 in his first season at the helm, returning to March Madness for the first time since Wright left.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis group had a great attitude all year,\u201d Willard said. \u201cThey were a great group to coach. There weren\u2019t a lot of expectations early in the year. A lot of people were talking down about them. I think they were way beyond what everyone thought they were going to be, and they did it with a great attitude and a great bunch to coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis group was one of my best I\u2019ve ever had coaching. I looked forward to getting to practice every day. I looked forward to games every day. They were just a really good group, and I think they represented the university at a very high level.\u201d<\/p>\n
They just have to improve on their out-of-bounds defense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was only midway through the first half, but Villanova head coach Kevin Willard was already ready for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":536013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2663,99,49111,53659],"class_list":["post-536012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-mens-college-basketball","tag-sports","tag-utah-state-aggies","tag-villanova-wildcats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/536013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}