Let’s be honest with ourselves. This has been one of the worst college basketball seasons in Big 5 history. Penn went 8-19 and fired Steve Donahue. Drexel? 18-15 and a first-round CAA exit. The retiring Fran Dunphy led La Salle to a 13th-place finish in the A10 and St. Joe’s is the only team still alive, currently 21-11 and facing Dayton in the A10 quarterfinals on Friday night. Barring a crazy run, the Hawk will inevitably die, and with it, the Delaware Valley’s NCAA tournament hopes, depending on whether or not you care about the Princeton Tigers.

But let’s talk about Villanova and Temple, who both crashed out of their conference tournaments on Thursday night.

The Wildcats took a five-point lead into halftime and went on to lose to a beatable UConn team by 17, which means they were outscored by 22 points in the second half. Eric Dixon, the nation’s top scorer, needed 17 to become the program’s all-time leading scorer and proceeded to shoot 2 for 15 from the floor and finish with eight points:

Brutal. He’s had such good year and improved so much at Nova. Crashing out of the Big East tourney with that performance was a tough one.

If the games were only 20 minutes long, Nova would be a #1 seed in March. But the games are no 20 minutes long, so it’s a 19-14 season for Villanova and three-straight years that they will miss the NCAA tournament after a 30-8 campaign during Jay Wright’s final year. Kyle Neptune in three seasons has mustered a 54-47 record, is 31-29 in Big East play, hasn’t won a single postseason game (0-2 in the NIT), and is only 4-5 against the Big 5. He will almost assuredly be fired.


Which brings us to Kyle Pagan’s pathetic Temple Owls, who crashed out of the AAC tournament at the hands of the 12-win, powerhouse Tulsa Golden Hurricane. This was an Owls team that was 12-6 at one point and started 4-1 in conference play. Jamal Mashburn Jr. was filling it up. Then he’s injured in February, the Owls lose six in a row, rebound with a three-game win streak, and crash out in round one of a conference tournament that no one watches. Our photo service doesn’t even have images from Thursday’s AAC games, which is a good snapshot of how meaningless that conference is.

Year over year it’s the slightest of improvements for Adam Fisher, who delivered only the second winning season since COVID. But the Owls haven’t been to the dance since 2019 and haven’t won a tournament game since 2013, when Barack Obama was in office and Khalif Wyatt was on the team. Maybe if Mashburn had stayed healthy and Quante Berry, too, then things would have turned out differently, but even then, was Temple ever a threat to go on some serious run?

So here we are. If Neptune is fired, that means half of the Big 5 will have new coaches in 2025. Fran Dunphy is retiring, Donahue is out, and Neptune is surely to follow. In comes Darris Nichols at La Salle but ask yourself what’s really moving the needle for Philly college hoops these days. What program are you bullish about? None. Billy Lange has St. Joe’s in the 20-win column, but does the ceiling go any higher? Probably not. These are bang-average programs in the NIL world and barely make a splash considering the saturation of the pro teams in this market. By the time we’ve put our time, energy, and emotion into the Eagles, Phillies, and winter underachievers (Flyers/Sixers), does anyone have anything left for the Big 5? Even the people who went to Big 5 schools don’t seem to have much juice. There’s no jam in these buildings. I don’t even know what the answer is. Only Villanova has a path out of purgatory, and that’s by hiring the right coach. Every other program is what it is, unless Temple cuts football and finds a way back into the A-10 or a more geographically-relevant conference. Otherwise, this is our new normal.