City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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So the Big 5 is officially now the City 6, even if it’s still going to be called the Big 5. 

The long-overdue inclusion of Drexel in the city’s annual hoops series was announced Tuesday morning in a press conference at Wells Fargo Center, Dragons coach Zack Spiker taking the stage with coaches from La Salle, Penn, St. Joe’s, Temple and Villanova for the first time. 

There’s no doubt the city series, which is nearly 70 years old, needs some juice after declining attendance and interest in games that used to draw sold-out crowds to doubleheaders at the Palestra, whose results used to be the talk of the town, whose best games are the stuff of legends in the City of Brotherly Love.

That was never more clear than in December, when an attempt at reviving a doubleheader at the Palestra only saw a lackluster crowd of 3,200 show up in total, with traditions like banners and streamers all but forgotten. The mostly-dead arena and uninspiring games, taking place in a year where no city schools made the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the 1970s, didn’t exactly scream “modern classic,” and it didn’t help matters much that seemingly none of the schools involved made an effort to get students down to the games. 

So yes, it needed a change. Especially if Villanova, which has had a contentious history with the city series, decided that four non-league games. But is the new format — two pods of three teams each, who will play the other two teams in their pod before a tripleheader at Wells Fargo Center on Dec. 2, 2023 — the right answer? 

The more time I spend thinking about it, the more my thoughts come to a resounding “meh.”

Okay, sure, the new alignment does what it needed to do: by going to only a three-game commitment, it frees up another spot on the non-conference slate, likely essential to keep ‘Nova from ending the Big 5 altogether, especially after the Big East moved to a 20-game league schedule a few years ago.

But at what cost? After all, with what the city series has become, it’s hard to see it bouncing back in any significant way from what came before. And now we have a watered-down series which will strip the city of half of its rivalries, the championships in a venue likely far too large for these games, without any clear indication that the schools will treat it any differently.

Start with the rivalries, or loss thereof. Temple, stuck in a pod with La Salle and Drexel, will only see Villanova every so often, the two best programs in the city losing their annual matchup. Drexel and Penn, right across the street from each other, will play less often as well. At least the Villanova/St. Joe’s rivalry is preserved, those two in a pod with Penn. It’s possible those schools could schedule each other outside of the city series, but that’s unlikely as they won’t want to face each other twice in the same month of the non-conference.

As for the new format’s victors: there will be a supposed Big 5 Championship game every year, between the two teams who win their respective pods. But that’s assuming two teams go 2-0 in their pods each year: it won’t be long before the Big 5 championship is just two of the six teams who went 1-1, and how exciting is that?

(As to what would exactly happen if all three teams in a pod are tied, that’s still unclear. One coach in the city heard that measures would be taken to avoid St. Joe’s and La Salle playing; another source said the tiebreakers would likely be metrics-based like KenPom rather than by point differential.)

(Oh, and one more note: the press release says the teams that win their pods will face off for first, which is obvious. But the teams that come in second place in their pods will face off for…second place? And the pod losers for third? How does THAT make any sense? The loser of the championship game should be the Big 5 runner-up. Though if that championship game loser is only 1-2 in the series…)

Anyways.

Then there’s the matter of the venue. 

The Palestra, which ostensibly has been the home of the Big 5 for its existence, is now going to be used for a sole Penn home game, and that’s it, at least when it comes to city games. The championship tripleheader will be held at the Wells Fargo Center, the 21,000-plus seat home of the Flyers and Sixers, which just went under a multi, multi-million dollar renovation of almost its entire interior. 

Wells Fargo’s going to seem like a cavern if only a couple thousand people show up per game in December. At least the tripleheader is on a Saturday, unlike this year’s Wednesday night doubleheader. Still not sure how much of a difference that really makes.

The upside, and the reason it’s even being held at the Wells Fargo Center, is that the event will now be put on by Spectacor Sports and Entertainment, a wing of Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Wells Fargo Center as well as the Philadelphia Flyers and numerous other sports and entertainment franchises, venues and event companies. 

But if SSE doesn’t get the buy-in from the athletic departments, then it’s a non-starter. Temple athletic director Arthur Johnson went on the record with the Temple News last fall, saying about the Big 5 games at the Palestra and encouraging students to get there: 

“That’s not our home game [...] Understanding and respect and love that history but we got a great arena that’s next door and we want to play at home. Again, I am pushing you to roll out of bed and walk across the street, I’m not trying to ask you to go down there to jump into that.”

If Johnson feels that way about sending students to one of the most historic gyms in the country and upholding a decades-old tradition, will he really feel differently about organizing students to go down to South Philly? All of that remains to be seen. 

Ultimately, the only thing that will save the Big 5 are the teams themselves. The city needs a brand other than Villanova — which just had its worst season in more than a decade as it navigates the post-Jay Wright era — to step up and have more than just the occasional good season. 

Temple, which loves to talk about how it’s in the top 10 all-time in program victories, is under new management in head coach Adam Fisher, whose first job as a program leader is to try and revive the Owls’ brand that it once had under John Chaney in the 80s and 90s, not to mention in the decades prior. St. Joe’s, which has been struggling in the first few years of the Billy Lange era, has its brightest roster in some time, led by rising junior Erik Reynolds II, with an exciting crop of underclassmen behind him. Penn and Drexel have both been more ‘solid’ than ‘bad’ over the last 15 years, but that’s not going to create much excitement outside of University City. La Salle, no doubt the toughest job in the city, has the 2013 Sweet 16 run to hang its hat on and not much else in the last quarter-century.

Barring an improvement by the whole group — which would help convince Villanova to stick around and play those games, by the way — this could be the last gasp of a once-great series that might end up just becoming a loose confederation of local schools that play each other regularly, just not in an organized format. In that sense, something is better than nothing. 

There’s certainly a chance these fears are for naught. Maybe the smaller format will revitalize the fans; maybe having it at Wells Fargo brings people out, a sold-out tripleheader that sees all six of the city’s men’s teams have their moment, with the women joining the following year. And Drexel absolutely deserved to be included, there’s no doubt about it. It’s just hard to see the city series being what it once was, and easier to see it as just a remnant of the past to reflect upon, something which helped set the tone for the city’s rich hoops culture today.

The Big 5 as we know it is dead. Long live the Big 5.