Villanova men’s basketball coach was signed to be one of the spokesmen for Dove Men+Care’s ‘Easy Decision’ campaign. Between his style, his composure, and his obvious care to do the best he can for the young men in his program, it’s pretty clear Jay Wright was an easy decision for Dove.
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With the start of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Dove Men+Care launched its ‘Easy Decision’ campaign, which means to shine a spotlight on basketball’s top decision makers to show sports fans that Dove Men+Care is an easy decision for men’s grooming routines.
Villanova coach Jay Wright was an obvious choice to be a spokesperson for the campaign. In addition to being one of the best coaches in college basketball, a man who has won 359 games during the course of his 20-year career, he is also one of the most stylish. There’s even a site almost entirely dedicated to tracking his style.
More importantly, though, he is a man who embodies the idea of making good decisions. On Friday, I wrote about the unfolding academic scandal at North Carolina. In contrast, the success Coach Wright and his program have achieved doesn’t come at the expense of academics. Everyone who has played for Coach Wright for four years has graduated.
Though Villanova’s season ended in disappointment last week with a loss to Connecticut in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, Coach Wright’s team clearly overachieved this year, ending with 29 wins and the Big East regular season championship. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Coach Wright about his team’s success, the future of the Big East, and just how good Doug McDermott really is.
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When asked about his team’s success, Coach Wright responded frankly, “This team surprised me. I thought we’d be good, but we won a bunch of close games, four in overtime, and I think it’s that mental toughness that put us over the top. We didn’t shoot the ball as well toward the end of the season as we did earlier in the year, but our defense improved and we rebounded the ball better.”
Wright attributes the team’s mental toughness to the experienced leadership exhibited by players like James Bell, who, in the coach’s words, “just had a monster senior year.” More importantly for next season, juniors Darrun Hilliard and JayVaughn Pinkston “just kept progressing.”
Noting the team’s experience, I asked Wright if he consciously sets out to recruit players he knows are likely to stay for all four years of college, in contrast to programs, like Kentucky, which seem complacent with the one-and-done system of recruiting players who are pretty clearly going to declare for the NBA after their freshman season.
“We don’t necessarily set out to recruit the guys who are going to stay at Villanova three or four years. What we’re looking for are the guys who want to be at Villanova, be part of Villanova for life. If a guy comes with that sincere intent and after his first season it’s clear he’s a top 10 NBA pick, we’re going to kick him out the door for his own good. That’s not the same thing as the kid who’s looking to play anywhere for a season before he moves on. For us intent matters.”
I asked Coach Wright what, if any impact he thought the one-and-done phenomenon had on the game of college basketball. He said it had “definitely had an impact. Some good, some bad. This year has been mostly good. You’ve had some kids come in who are likely to move on at the end of the year who have really clicked with their teams in a way that sometimes hasn’t happened in the past.”
“Though,” he added, “you have to remember a lot of these guys would be going straight to the NBA from high school. At least we get them for a year, which is a good thing.”
The conversation then shifted to the Villanova basketball program’s graduation rate, which currently stands at a gaudy 100%. To put that in perspective, the University of Connecticut men’s basketball team, the opponent at whose hands Villanova’s season ended, was ineligible for post-season play last year because its graduation rate was then only 11%, or just 1 out of every 9 players that were recruited to play for the University.
“Our graduation rate is the thing I take most pride in at Villanova. Everyone at the University, from the President on down, wants us to compete for a national championship evey year, but they’re also concerned that our players want to be part of Villanova, be part of Villanova for life, so that includes the academic piece, everything. We want to provide them the education they will need whether they leave after one year or graduate in four.”
I asked Coach Wright about the future of the conference his team competes in, the Big East, which recently underwent a major reorganization. The league was founded in the late 70s for basketball and it’s signature members—Georgetown, St. John’s, Villanova—are mostly small, Catholic schools that either don’t have a football program or one that competes at a level below the Football Bowl Series, the highest level of NCAA competition.
To try and compete with the other major conferences, the Big East added football in the early 90s, but after losing a number of members over the last decade to the Atlantic Coast Conference—including Boston College, Virginia Tech, Miami, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh—the league made the decision to reconstitute itself as a basketball only conference, bringing in new members Creighton and Butler, while the remaining schools that have FBS football programs spun off to create the American Athletic Conference.
The danger for the remaining Big East programs is that football drives the television contracts, not basketball, and the league runs the risk of being shut out of the prime time television slots in which the other major conferences will be playing.
Coach Wright isn’t concerned about that, though. He is “really excited about the future of the Big East. The league has a really good recruiting class coming in. We like playing everyone twice. (When the league was 16 teams, the schedule didn’t allow for teams to play every other team in the league twice.) It’s helped new rivalries develop much faster. It’s also nice to travel to play at schools where basketball is the big sport, not football.”
Wright also added, “We’re staying connected to the Big 5 leagues. Our league’s commissioner has done a great job of staying connected with them and right now we’re producing a product as good as and, in some cases, better than them.”
The most obvious example is Doug McDermott, who, despite his team’s loss the same weekend of the NCAA Tournament as Villanova’s, is the presumptive national player of the year. McDermott finished his career as the fifth all-time leading scorer in the history of college basketball. Still, questions remain about his ability to compete at the next level. I asked Coach Wright about that.
“Doug McDermott is the real deal. He moves without the ball as well as anyone I’ve ever seen, better even than a guy like J.J. Reddick. He always makes the right read off the screen. Without a doubt, he is Player of the Year. And I don’t just say that because he’s in our league. I saw him this summer with the Team USA development squad and he held his own against the NBA players out there. He looked like one of them.”
Aside from his success, his style, his genuine concern for the university he represents and the young men he recruits to be part of that university, what also makes Coach Wright a perfect choice for Dove Men+Care’s ‘Easy Decision’ campaign is his sideline demeanor, which is calm and composed. I asked him if this was a conscious decision to model for his players the behavior he wants them to evince on and off the court.
“I try to model calm and confidence because that’s what we’re trying to instill in the kids. In practice, we talk all the time about the right way to respond to a bad play or a bad call. I can’t expect them to do it if I don’t. Though sometimes I think they do it better even than I do.”
Despite the disappointing loss to Connecticut, Jay Wright’s and Villanova’s future appears bright. The core of this year’s team, including Hilliard and Pinkston, will be back next season, another year of experience under their belts.
As other programs around the country look to reload with a new crop of high-prized recruits, Villanova, led by the implacable Jay Wright, will continue to make the right decisions regarding the future of its program and the young men who constitute it. It is for that very reason that Dove Men+Care picked Jay Wright to be one of its ‘Easy Decision’ spokesmen, which, one might say, was an easy decision.
AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh