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Today, the expected retirement of Villanova’s long-time men’s basketball coach Jay Wright took place in Philadelphia.
The 60-year old Wright led the Wildcats for 21 seasons, won 70% of the games he coached, and added two national championships (2016 and 2018) as his teams made four different Final Four appearances during his tenure at Villanova. He was already inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall-of-Fame (a rare feat for an active coach). Jay Wright earned a reported $6 million per year at Villanova.
So, why would a successful college basketball coach of Jay Wright’s caliber leave today?
Is the NBA luring him away? Does he have a personal or family medical issue which is concerning him? Can this really be the same Coach Jay Wright who just led Villanova into the NCAA’s Final Four last month in New Orleans?
During today’s retirement announcement at the school, Jay Wright said that his greatest honor was “just to be the coach at Villanova. Accolades or winning games are not as big as just being the coach at Villanova!”
The Villanova basketball coach told reporters that he just didn’t have the same “edge” anymore to continue on. Wright felt like this year was the first time when he wasn’t the most fired-up person on his own basketball team. Even though his Villanova Wildcats reached the Final Four in New Orleans a month ago, the long-time coach felt like his personal fire had begun to extinguish.
“Before, I would never have to think about anything. I started to think like,‘I have to get myself fired up here. Let’s go.’”
According to Villanova’s athletic website, Jay Wright isn’t leaving the school entirely. He will now move into a new position with the university in fundraising, advising, and education. Wright’s long-time assistant coach, Kyle Neptune, will now take the coaching reins. The new head basketball coach was formally announced at Villanova today.
Why did Coach Jay Wright decide to quit the job he obviously loved so much?
Burnout is real and a likely culprit in his decision. Before Jay Wright took the job at Villanova in 2001, the Wildcats’ men’s basketball program had become nationally prominent under the school’s affable former head coach, Rollie Massimino. Coach Wright realized that there was going to be pressure to win as accepted the Villanova job.
Jay Wright raced ahead and immediately re-established Villanova as one of the premier basketball programs on the East Coast. The new coach was able to recruit top talent to come play basketball at this academically-tough private Catholic school in Philadelphia with an enrollment of 10,000 students. Villanova’s average incoming freshman class scores an average of 32 out of possible 36 on the national ACT exam!
Recruiting the right type of student-athletes to come to Villanova to play college basketball was never an easy task. Like at Duke University, Villanova’s tough academic requirements eliminated a large number of high school basketball players.
By coming to play college basketball at Villanova, a talented high school athlete had the opportunity to improve his game by learning from one of the nation’s most talented teachers in Jay Wright. The Wildcats’ basketball coach was known for his teams being fundamentally sound and having nearly flawless execution on both offense and defense. Villanova basketball teams under Coach Wright would simply wear down most opponents by the end of the game.
Another unique aspect of Villanova basketball under Coach Jay Wright was that they rarely featured one single player as the team’s primary scoring option. Every player on the court was expected to fulfill a role. The Villanova coach molded his teams into his own image. By the end of a player’s years at Villanova, their personal basketball IQ would increase by playing their coach’s smart, fundamentally sound team-oriented game at full intensity.
Winning basketball games and remaining a national power became expected at Villanova.
Perhaps you and I can think of a handful of college head coaches (football, baseball, women’s sports, etc.) who seem to excel at their sport by being a top teacher of the game’s fundamentals and instilling the personal maturity and team discipline needed to become proficient winners before their players exit the program.
And I think that’s why Jay Wright is leaving college basketball coaching now.
It’s one thing to recruit the right type of player to come to Villanova and commit to becoming proficient in his program for several years. In today’s new NCAA, players are eligible to transfer from one school to the next as virtual “free agents” from year to year via the current transfer portal program. As covered in a previous story, nearly 25% of college basketball players will attempt to transfer prior to next fall.
Now, let’s sprinkle in the money being paid (legally) by mysterious middlemen to incoming freshmen in return for the rights to commercially utilize that player’s “Name, Image, and Likeness” (NIL). This new NIL system (as it exists today) allows top recruits to grab the cash heading out of high school with no recourse. The player does not have to repay any NIL money should the player decide to leaves that college (via the transfer portal) the following year.
The moving van business is booming!
To become successful utilizing the style of basketball being taught by Jay Wright at Villanova, basketball players must become proficient in learning the basics and having them become ingrained into their personal basketball skill set. The process takes more than one year.
Like a master gardener, Coach Wright was able to take the seeds (incoming freshmen) and carefully nurture them into full development. In Villanova’s case, that Jay Wright’s teams were capable of going deep in the annual NCAA basketball tournament. The Wildcats made the NCAA tournament field in 16 out of 21 seasons under Coach Wright.
With the combination of the NCAA’s transfer portal and a newly sanctioned “Wild West” style of cash being disbursed to the top athletic recruits by mostly unknown sources, I can see where a master teacher such as Coach Jay Wright sees that this new college basketball landscape has become a canvas which he doesn’t want to paint anymore.
The coach recently said as much.
“I think those changes are eventually going to be really good for college basketball,” Wright said. “I’m so impressed with how we handled NIL as a team. Some of our guys made really good money. And they had 3.8 GPAs and they went to a Final Four. But there is a side of it where … [Coach Neptune and our younger assistants] are at another level than me when it comes to that stuff. They’re really visionary about it. And I feel like I’m the coach that’s trying to keep up with it. That impacted us where we felt like this is a good time to retire.”
Watching Villanova basketball teams coached by Jay Wright meant that his squad wasn’t likely to be the one making crucial mistakes during the final minutes of play. To develop that kind of team discipline, though, Jay Wright’s preferred style of basketball required his student-athletes to fully commit to playing at Villanova for more than just one season to become proficient in his system.
These recent changes may have served to deflate the thrill which Jay Wright receives from teaching basketball to college student-athletes.
Coach Wright’s style of coaching basketball was a masterful art form. To deal with the rapid changes in today’s college sports landscape, successful coaches of every sport will need to become more flexible and learn to deal with the new annual game of “cat herding” to assemble a team as so many players decide to come and go as they please.
Instead of recruiting the right type of personality to come into his college basketball program and hoping they would stay for a few years, Coach Jay Wright saw the handwriting on the wall. Though he remained committed to his players, the long-time coach wasn’t able to forecast with certainty how many of his new recruits would be willing to reciprocate and stick with him long enough to be successful in his basketball system.
The master class in college basketball skills being taught by Villanova’s Jay Wright just ended. Though today is a sad day for many of us, it was marvelous to watch Coach Wright’s teams during the past 21 years while he was the team’s primary basketball instructor.
Well done, Coach!