Men's Basketball
The Villanova Wildcats compete in the Big East Basketball Conference and are coached by Jay Wright. Coach Wright has taken the Wildcats to 10 consecutive postseasons including 7 consecutive trips (2005–2011) to the NCAA Tournament. Villanova has appeared in the NIT 17 times, winning in 1994, and won the Big East Tournament in 1995. The Wildcats joined the Big East for the 1981 season.
The Villanova Wildcats have appeared in the NCAA Men's Tournament 32 times, the 8th highest total in NCAA history have reached the Elite Eight 12 times. They have been to the Final Four of the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship on four occasions. The 1939 team coached by Al Severance reached the inaugural NCAA Final Four played at the Palestra for the 1939 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament. All-American Howard Porter led a Wildcat team coached by Jack Kraft to Final Four of the 1971 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament. Coach Rollie Massimino took Villanova to the amazing 1985 National Championship. Current Coach Jay Wright reached the Final Four at the 2009 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament behind Dante Cunningham and Scottie Reynolds.
Villanova won the 1985 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament with a historic 66-64 win over top-seeded Georgetown. The eighth-seeded Wildcats (unranked in the final AP poll) beat Dayton (at Dayton), top-seeded Michigan, Maryland and second-seeded North Carolina to win the Southeast Regional en route to the Final Four in Lexington, Kentucky. After defeating 2-seed Memphis State in the national semifinals, Villanova met defending champion and ten-point-favorite Georgetown, led by Patrick Ewing, in the title game on April 1, 1985. The Wildcat squad remains the lowest overall seed in tournament history to win the championship, and their overall team shooting percentage of 78.6% remains an NCAA tournament record for a single game. This Championship Game is often cited among the greatest upsets in college basketball history. Ed Pinckney, who shot 5-of-7 and had 16 points in the game, was named the NCAA Tournament's Most Outstanding Player.
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Famous quotes containing the words men and/or basketball:
“When I go into a museum and see the mummies wrapped in their linen bandages, I see that the lives of men began to need reform as long ago as when they walked the earth. I come out into the streets, and meet men who declare that the time is near at hand for the redemption of the race. But as men lived in Thebes, so do they live in Dunstable today.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)