Villanova men’s basketball coach Kevin Willard used his press conference following his team’s 93-71 exhibition loss to Virginia to tell the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Jeff Neiburg that his story about Villanova’s exit from the Big 5 was false and that he was a bad writer, then went on to confirm nearly every detail Neiburg had reported.
Neiburg’s story, published Thursday morning, revealed that Philadelphia’s Big 5 is moving on without Villanova after the six schools failed to agree on a format beyond this season. Since 1955, Villanova, Penn, Temple, La Salle, and Saint Joseph’s have faced one another every season for an unofficial city championship, playing a full round robin for nearly seven decades in a series long associated with Penn’s Palestra.
Villanova has won 30 of those titles, more than any other school, including last season’s, while Temple sits second with 28.
As interest in the series waned, the schools revamped the event in 2023, adding Drexel as a sixth member and splitting the teams into two three-team pods. Each school plays its two pod opponents, one at home and one on the road, and the pod standings determine the matchups for the Big 5 Classic, a one-day tripleheader at Xfinity Mobile Arena where the first-place teams meet for the championship. Attendance at the Classic has declined each year since, falling from more than 15,000 in 2023 to just over 14,000 in 2024 and 10,361 last December, roughly half the arena’s capacity, as the Inquirer noted.
The three-year agreement governing the format expires after this season, and Villanova had no desire to commit to another cycle under the same terms, which is why Willard and the school lobbied for an alternative arrangement that the other five programs ultimately balked at.
And while all of the reporting, from Neiburg’s sourcing on Villanova’s proposal to the five schools’ joint statement announcing they would move forward without the Wildcats, points the finger at Villanova, the program’s head coach offered a decidedly different account of how one of college basketball’s oldest city rivalries came apart.
Here are Kevin Willard’s full comments on the Big 5 tonight. He criticized the Inquirer’s reporting while essentially also confirming the details of the story in his answers. https://t.co/rVAr1mxz8O
— Jeff Neiburg (@Jeff_Neiburg) October 23, 2026
“Unfortunately, it really wasn’t a Villanova decision,” Willard said. “Either you wrote a really poor article or people can’t read your article, but this wasn’t a Villanova decision. We wanted it… From a month ago, we thought we had a deal. I think you need to talk to the Temple AD and get your stories right. This is not a Villanova thing. Villanova wants to be in the Big 5. They are the Big 5. But unfortunately, either people are illiterate, which I don’t think they are, or you’re just a bad writer.”
When Neiburg asked whether Villanova wanted to keep the current format, Willard called it “stupid.” He said he had pushed for a Hall of Fame banquet the night before the Classic, which he claimed the other schools couldn’t afford, along with a schedule that built more predictably toward the tripleheader.
“The other schools couldn’t afford it, supposedly, or didn’t want to do it,” Willard said of the banquet.
“And then I wanted the games to lead up to the Xfinity game. I wanted to have continuity and the fact that people would know when we’re playing, so that we can actually get people to the games. We played La Salle and there was 500 people. You know, Penn played Saint Joe’s and there’s 2,000 people. My whole thing was I just wanted to make it the way it was, but the other schools didn’t see it the same way.”
Willard then explained the format Villanova had wanted, which Neiburg’s sources described as giving the two teams with the highest NET rankings from the previous season a bye and a home game heading into the Classic. Villanova finished 34th in the NET last season. The next-best Big 5 school, Saint Joseph’s, was 111th.
While Willard conceded that the format didn’t technically guarantee Villanova would never play on the road, he admitted the other schools didn’t believe that would ever happen, and he again singled out Johnson as the one who killed the proposal. Multiple sources told Neiburg, however, that Temple was far from the only school unwilling to approve it.
In regards to Kevin Willard blaming Temple: according to multiple sources, Temple wasn’t the only school that wasn’t going to sign off on the format that Villanova wanted.
— Jeff Neiburg (@Jeff_Neiburg) October 23, 2026
Willard also suggested Neiburg’s reporting mentioned Villanova only to drive traffic, claiming nobody would have clicked on the story otherwise.
“I know the only way he could get clicks is to put Villanova in it, because if they didn’t put Villanova, no one would click on his article,” Willard said. “… Your own headline says it. I’m still perplexed that people didn’t read your article. I’m not perplexed. I now know why. But it says that the five other schools decided to opt out. It wasn’t Villanova. Villanova was all in. They opted out.”
The headline did say the five other schools were moving forward with a round-robin format without Villanova in 2027-28, because that’s exactly what they announced, and the story underneath it laid out why, explaining that Villanova had no interest in keeping the current format and that its alternative would have all but guaranteed the Wildcats never played another Big 5 road game.
“So talk to the other schools,” Willard said. “This is not a Villanova issue. The other schools opted out. They didn’t want to play us.”
Full disclosure: I’m a Temple graduate. But you don’t need Cherry and White tinted glasses to see that Willard’s version of events doesn’t hold up against his own words.
In June 2025, only a few months after taking the Villanova job, Willard told the Inquirer that an annual Atlantic 10 road game was an undue burden for a team already playing 20 Big East games, and that surrendering a home date was costly at a time when revenue had become paramount. Sixteen months later, he swore Villanova had been “all in” on the Big 5 and “didn’t opt out,” even though his school’s proposal was custom-built to resolve the very grievances he aired before he ever coached a Big 5 game.
Despite all his talk Thursday night about loving the Big 5 and being “all in,” Willard never set out to preserve a 70-year-old tradition so much as reshape it into something that served Villanova’s bottom line. From the outset, Villanova sought an arrangement that would all but ensure the Wildcats hosted their Big 5 games and never again had to make the trip to North Broad Street, Olney, or Hawk Hill. And when the other five schools refused to play ball, he recast himself — and his school — as the aggrieved party desperately trying to hold the Big 5 together.
Villanova’s athletic department now faces the task of salvaging its standing with five neighboring schools after its basketball coach publicly scapegoated one of their athletic directors and derided another school’s fan base. People who had no part in Thursday’s tirade, including Denise Dillon, whose women’s program is still expected to compete in the Big 5 alongside all five schools, will have to do much of the work to mend those relationships, according to Neiburg.
Willard was hired to win Big East games and chase national titles, and nothing about his contemptible press conference diminishes his ability to do either. It did show, however, how little regard he has for the parts of the job that require him to be a good neighbor, and Villanova will pay for that long after this season’s Classic. In fact, the bill has already come due on the football side, where a 2027 game against Temple that had been in the works is no longer happening, Awful Announcing has learned.
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