City of Basketball Love

By Jeff Griffith +
Josh Verlin
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The current era of college basketball features more change than ever.

Players have an array of opportunities to find their right fit throughout their career. Rosters turn over drastically year-over-year — some for better, some for worse. And this offseason has certainly been one of change in the Big 5, with coaches and players coming and going all over the place, especially on the men’s side, though the women’s side hasn’t been unaffected.

And while change can sometimes be a good thing, it’s hard to feel optimistic about the current state of Big 5 hoops.

Since the end of the 2024-25 college basketball season, three of the six Big 5 men’s programs had to replace head coaches, one due to retirement and two through firings. The three coaches who’ve stayed have taken some heavy blows via the transfer portal. 

It all means that few teams in the city, if any, are where they want to be. 

In an NIL era which has seen new programs take over the spotlight by pushing the right new buttons, the city’s teams seem to be a step or two behind this curve after an overall middling 2024-25 season that’s continuing a downward trend for a group of schools for whom national prominence used to be a given.

Of course, the city’s no-doubt premier program for the past decade has been Villanova. The Wildcats are still fewer than 10 years removed from a pair of national titles, but since Kyle Neptune replaced Jay Wright after the school’s 2022 Final Four appearance, things haven’t been the same. 

Villanova (19-14, 11-9 Big East) didn’t make the NCAA Tournament in Neptune’s three-year run, and the Wildcats haven’t really sniffed the tournament, either. 2022-23 and 2023-24 saw Villanova go 17-17 and 18-16 respectively, landing firmly outside the March Madness conversation. 

At times, this past season showed flashes; as of early February, there were discussions of the Wildcats’ bubble hopes, but a 19-14 record and early Big East Tournament exit wasn’t going to cut it. Villanova earned itself some marquee wins, toppling Connecticut, St. John’s and Marquette, but also took backbreaking losses to Columbia (12-15), Providence (12-20), and Georgetown (17-15) twice, all of which resulted in Neptune’s ousting just a few days after a loss to Connecticut in the Big East tournament in March. 

Since then, the Wildcats have hired Kevin Willard as the program’s new head coach, which is cause for encouragement given his winning track record. Between 12 seasons at Seton Hall and three at Maryland, Willard earned a combined record of 290-200 (.591), eight NCAA Tournament berths, and a trip to this year’s Sweet Sixteen. 

So, there’s reason for optimism. But this offseason is still yet another transition nonetheless, especially with 10 of the 12 Wildcats who logged minutes this past season either in the portal or out of eligibility. So far, the only additions have been Temple wing Zion Stanford and 7-footer Braden Pierce, who followed Willard from Maryland after playing in five games last year.

There’s a lot to do on the Main Line. There’s arguably more to do just about everywhere else.

The Penn Quakers (8-19, 4-10 Ivy) returned right back to square one this offseason, finishing the nine-year Steve Donahue era with a thud; Penn won eight games this year, its first single-digit-win season in a decade, prior to firing Donahue. Penn won the Ivy League with an impressive 24-9 (12-2 Ivy) campaign in 2018, but that’s seven years ago now, and the Quakers haven’t really contended for an Ivy league title since. 

Penn made an intriguing hire with new head coach Fran McCaffery, who reached seven NCAA Tournaments in 15 seasons at Iowa following successful stops at Siena, UNC-Greensboro and Lehigh, taking all four programs to March Madness. The Quakers recently signed former Virginia forward T.J. Power, who originally committed to Duke out of the 2023 class and has averaged 1.7 ppg in limited minutes across two seasons of ACC basketball; more important will be seeing if they can coax rising junior Sam Brown out of the portal after the sharpshooter from Lower Merion entered it near the end of May.

La Salle (14-19, 5-13 Atlantic 10) serves as one of the more complicated situations to assess. On one hand, the Explorers didn’t fire their head coach; city staple Fran Dunphy retired after 33 seasons, the last three of which were at La Salle. His career included 17 NCAA Tournament appearances, but none of those came with the Explorers; Dunphy’s tenure at La Salle featured three of his career’s nine total sub-.500 seasons. The Explorers haven’t eclipsed .500 since 2014-15, and haven’t seen the NCAA Tournament since 2013’s miracle Sweet Sixteen run. 

New coach Darris Nichols, who’s spent the last four years at Radford, inherits a nice new refurbished gym in the John Glaser Arena and an almost entirely new roster assembled from all over the place — incoming freshmen, junior college transfers, a few former Radford players and more. The list of coaches not from Philly hired to coach in the Big 5 is a short one, and it’s on Nichols to prove he can find success at a school that doesn’t have many of the resources of its Atlantic 10 counterparts, not to mention the rest of mid-to-high-major D-I hoops.

And we’re not done yet. While their head coaches currently remain intact, Temple, Drexel and St. Joe’s all have taken some big blows this offseason on the roster side.

The Owls, after the second year of the Adam Fisher era, lost most of the roster to either graduation or the transfer portal, with Dillon Battie, Zion Stanford, Quante Berry, Elijah Gray and Jameel Brown all electing to leave with eligibility remaining; former commit Cam Miles withdrew his pledge earlier this month, leaving Westtown’s Cam Wallace as the only one in Temple’s incoming class. 

The Dragons, who’ve generally done well in nine years under Zach Spiker, will similarly have a lot to replace following the transfers of Yame Butler, Jason Drake, Kobe MaGee and Cole Hargrove, Drexel’s top four scorers from this past year. Butler (Butler) and Hargrove (Providence) will both play in the Big East next season. 

St. Joe’s took perhaps the biggest individual hit of the offseason as sophomore guard Xzayvier Brown entered the portal. The expectation is that he’ll end up at Oklahoma along with stepfather Justin Scott, a Hawks’ assistant coach who will reportedly take the same spot at OU. Billy Lange now has to replace Brown along with the program’s all-time leading scorer, Erik Reynolds II and junior forward Rasheer Fleming, who scouts expect to be picked in the late first or early second rounds of the NBA Draft in June. 

Lange has generally done a good job in the wake of Phil Martelli’s firing, though one could argue this year’s team, which had NCAA Tournament hopes entering the season, underachieved; with Brown, Reynolds and Fleming gone, he’s got a crater of leadership and production to fill in this offseason. 

The biggest news on the women’s side has been the transfer of Saint Joseph’s junior Laura Ziegler, who could have cemented her place as one of the program’s all-time greats with one more season on Hawk Hill. Villanova sophomore Maddie Webber, the Wildcats’ second-leading scorer, hit the portal, but star freshman Jasmine Bascoe will return for head coach Denise Dillon. 

Ultimately, Philadelphia remains a strong basketball city, continues to produce top high school talent, and has a thriving local fan base that rivals any in the sport. 

But after such a crazy four weeks, it’s an unavoidable fact that the Big 5 is in flux. And the 2025 offseason will be as important as any to help it return to prominence — if such a return is even possible.