Team: Villanova Wildcats
2025-26 Record: 24-9, 15-5 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: Third, two games behind UConn and five games in front of Seton Hall
Final 2025-26 Computer Rankings
NET: #34
KenPom.com: #33
BartTorvik.com: #34
Postseason: After suffering the most embarrassing loss of the Big East tournament — falling to last place Georgetown in the quarterfinals after the Hoyas had already upset DePaul a day earlier, which is the second most embarrassing loss — Villanova still had a profile that was good enough for a #8 seed in the NCAA tournament, marking their first appearance in the dance since 2022. However, they fell apart late, giving up a 14-1 run in an 86-76 loss to #9 Utah State.
Notable Departures: Well, where do you want to start here? Duke Brennan came in as a one year guy after two years at Grand Canyon and a season at Arizona State before that. Devin Askew was actually on his sixth year of college thanks to starting in the 2020-21 season and picking up an entirely separate redshirt season along the way in his stops at Kentucky, Texas, Cal, and Long Beach State. Villanova was always going to lose those two. Brennan is the bigger loss since he averaged a double-double (12.4 points, 10.3 rebounds, plus two assists) and started in 32 appearances, but Askew’s not a nobody. He appeared in all 33 games even though he only started twice, and he averaged 23 minutes a game which is great for a sub. He shot over 40% behind the arc and averaged 9.8 points, 2.6 rebounds, and 2.1 assists. For his role, he was pretty great, and so, that’s a pretty important loss even if it was expected. Those are the kinds of guys you love to have in the first year of a new coaching regime.
That sends us along to two guys who arrived with the new coaching regime a year ago and are already back out the door in the transfer portal. Bryce Lindsay started in 31 of his 33 appearances, so he had the bigger role. He was one of four double digit scorers on the team at 12.3 points per game, and he added two rebounds and two assists. He led the Wildcats in three-point attempts per game at 6.6, and his 36% shooting was absolutely fine for that level of firing away. That’s not that far off from what he did at James Madison the year before, and now he’s going to try to recreate that at Indiana. The other one-and-done transfer is Malachi Palmer, and this one’s slightly more annoying/troubling from a roster building perspective. It’s not that a guy with a major role is leaving — Palmer only started four times and averaged 18 minutes a game and just 4.6 points — it’s that a guy who came in with the new head coach is heading right back out the door one year later. Palmer — who hails from Pennsylvania! — is off to try his hand at Minnesota.
That leaves us with just one more outbound transfer to discuss, and it’s the biggest one. Acaden Lewis was originally committed to Kentucky back in the day and ultimately changed directions to end up with Villanova last spring. The former top 40 prospect was a preseason candidate to be Big East Freshman of the Year, and only the twists and turns of Marquette’s season swiped that away from him and left the trophy with Nigel James. Heck, Lewis was even my pick to take the trophy, the coaches just voted in the other direction. 12.2 points and 5.3 assists per game with a more than acceptable turnover rate is outstanding stuff from your freshman point guard, but instead of seeing what he’s going to do as a sophomore, the VU faithful are watching the D.C. native head to Miami.
Key Returners: Well, as you can tell from the last section, this is a little bit bleak.
You’d think that Villanova might be in an awful lot of trouble after that departing guys section, but the fact of the matter is that the Wildcats do return their top scorer from last season. No, really! Tyler Perkins was VU’s leader there, putting in 13.7 points per game and shooting nearly 37% behind the three-point line. Hey, look, I’m as surprised to learn that he was the top scorer as you are. With four guys between 13.7 and 12.2, clearly that mantle of leadership was bouncing around the roster a bit as the season trucked along, and that obviously has some explanation for the surprise.
Here’s the bleak part: Perkins is the only rotation player that we’re sure is going to be okay on Opening Night for Villanova. Matt Hodge tore his ACL on February 28th and obviously missed the rest of the season after averaging 9.2 points and 3.6 rebounds and adding 37% three-point shooting. Now, you’d think that “torn ACL on what is effectively March 1st” means Hodge is done for 2026-27. However, back in late June, word came out of the program that Hodge is “tracking toward being ready for the beginning of the season.” If you want to believe eight months is enough for an ACL rehab, then sure. On top of that, with the NCAA installing five years/five seasons rules this summer, there’s no reason for Hodge to sit out once he gets the 100% clearance from the doctors, no matter when that actually happens. Is that going to be by November 1st? We’ll see, but at worst, Hodge’s clearance will eventually give Nova two returning rotation guys.
Key Additions: Two of Villanova’s three freshmen on the roster are worth mentioning here. Adam Oumiddoch (6’5”, 180 lb. freshman guard, Woodbridge, Virginia) is a top 70 prospect out of Virginia, and with essentially nothing returning in the VU rotation, it would seem to be a safe bet for him to get a crack at minutes right away. Luigi Suigo (7’3”, 289 lb. freshman center, Tradate, Varese, Italy) had originally put himself into the 2026 NBA Draft but ended up withdrawing before the deadline and enrolling with the Wildcats. I’ve got issues with guys wandering around in the G League and then turning around to head to college hoops, but I see nothing wrong with Suigo assessing his best possibilities and ending up in the Big East. He’s the tallest player on the roster, so that definitely tilts his way in terms of having an impact, but he won’t be alone in vying for minutes at center.
We may as well start the look at VU’s seven transfers with the guy who will be right there with Suigo in terms of minutes in the middle. Kwame Evans (6’10”, 220 lb. senior forward, Baltimore, Maryland) broke through for Oregon as a junior last season, averaging 13.3 points and 7.4 rebounds while playing nearly 31 minutes a night in 30 starts. There’s at least reason to believe both guys can shoot it from the outside, so that does raise a question as to whether or not these guys can play together at all.
There’s two transfers that we’re just going to skip over here because both guys don’t have the production history to qualify as Key Additions, and on top of that, both of them are coming off injuries that cost them most or all of last season. The other four transfers were all double digit scorers at their last stops. Elijah Crawford (6’3”, 187 lb. junior guard, Augusta, Georgia) missed a big chunk of time in the first half of last season at Illinois-Chicago but ended up getting into the starting lineup and averaging 14.1 points and 4.9 assists per game. He is not a shooter at just 27.6% on 3.3 attempts per game last year, but the passing is too good to ignore. Jake Fiegen (6’4”, 205 lb. senior guard, Wilmette, Illinois) has been building and building over his three years at Cornell, and pushed his way back into the starting lineup this past season after seeing it slip out of his hands between sophomore and junior year. He averaged 17.1 points, 5.1 rebounds, and 2.1 assists per game last year and he’s just short of 40% on threes the past two seasons combined.
Devin Royal (6’6”, 230 lb. senior forward, Columbus, Ohio) is the only other high major transfer coming in next to Evans. He’s been at Ohio State the past three seasons, and has always been a rotation player at worst for his hometown Buckeyes. His last two seasons were pretty similar, ending up with averages of 13.7 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 1.4 assists per game. We’ll have to wait to see how his 30% three-point shooting fits in with the Wildcats and his other new teammates. Finally, there’s Darryl Simmons (5’11”, 175 lb. senior guard, Detroit, Michigan) who was at Gardner-Webb for two years before bouncing off to St. Bonaventure for one year and then moving along to the Main Line. He’s been a big scoring threat for both GW and SBU the last two years, averaging 16.8 points per game and cashing nearly 41% of his three-pointers at a rate of 6.6 attempts per game. He’ll get you a little bit on the rebounding and assists columns as well, but clearly the shooting is the major component to Simmons’ game here.
Coach: Kevin Willard, entering his second season with the Wildcats and 20th as a Division 1 head coach. He has a 249-170 record in the Big East (counting his previous stint at Seton Hall) and 383-267 overall.
Outlook: Who’s ready for a FUN FACT about last season for Villanova
Here you go: Their #33 finish in the KenPom.com rankings was just the sixth time in Kevin Willard’s 19 year Division 1 coaching career that his team finished in the top 40. It was also the first time that Willard had ever done that in back-to-back seasons, and a tip of the cap to him for doing it with the difficulty bonus of doing it with two different teams.
That’s what I was talking about last year when I was casting a lot of doubt about whether or not Kevin Willard was going to be capable of succeeding in this job. There’s a lot of “Iiiiiiiiiii don’t know about that” in his history, but to his credit and to his players’ credit, they threw all of that aside, punched out a 12-2 start to the season with only losses to BYU and Michigan against them, and essentially carried that kind of performance through the 20 game Big East slate. That got them an NCAA tournament bid, snapping a three year drought for the Wildcats, and all in all: Big Success!
Yes, being unable to answer a 16-2 run by Georgetown in the conference tournament was very not good. Yes, giving up a 14-1 run to gag away their NCAA tournament game was very not good. But you can kind of wash all of that away by saying “eh, Year 1, end of the day, it’s fine, it was an improvement on the Kyle Neptune years, on to 2027.”
Except now Kevin Willard’s starting all over again. Keeping Tyler Perkins on board will be helpful, but he might have been the least interesting leading scorer in the entire Big East last season. There’s a big ol’ collection of transfers with a history of producing at the Division 1 level coming in, but there’s no guarantee that it’s all going to fit together. In theory, the 5 years/5 seasons rule is going to allow some of these guys to stick around longer than just the 2026-27 season, but part of me wonders if that will happen. After all, we can’t be sure that Willard recruited them to stick around for more than one year because they were brought it before the NCAA approved those rules, and with the departures of Acaden Lewis, Bryce Lindsay, and Malachi Palmer, I don’t think we can feel 100% comfortable in saying that Willard is big on being able to retain players.
BartTorvik.com projects this Villanova team as top 30 in the country, and that holds true even if you pull Matt Hodge out of the lineup since it’s a little too early to guarantee that he’ll be ready to go right away. That’s good news, but that’s just a computer guessing at how everything fits. You gotta play the games on a hardwood floor, and at the end of the day, as we alluded to a moment ago: Kevin Willard has never coached three straight top 40 teams. There’s a first time for everything, of course, but I’m going to need to see this train on the tracks before I believe that it runs.
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