Villanova fires Neptune after three disappointing seasons

Kyle Neptune is out as head coach of Villanova men’s basketball, the school announced on Saturday.

Neptune was let go after three seasons as the head coach, two days after his Wildcats lost in the Big East quarterfinals against UConn. Mike Nardi will serve as interim head coach for Villanova, which should be in line for an NIT berth. A head coaching search would seem likely afterward for a program that has had only four head coaches since Rollie Massimino took over in 1973.

“Since coming to Villanova, I have been struck by Kyle’s tireless work ethic and his dedication to the student-athletes he served,” Director of Athletics Eric Roedl, a Villanova alum hired to the position in November, said in a statement. “We are grateful to Kyle for his long service to Villanova and his mentorship to the many outstanding young men he has coached.”

Neptune replaced Jay Wright in 2022, a tall order to follow a coach who had won two national titles at the school. Neptune never lived up to the heights that Wright took the program, going 54-47 in three seasons. Villanova seems fated to a third straight NIT berth.

Villanova is 19-14 this season, unable to sustain consistent winning basketball despite four wins over Top 25 teams.

In three seasons, Neptune was 4-5 against Big 5 opposition, sharing the title with Temple in 2023 and then finishing sixth in the first Big 5 Classic a year later. He posted a 31-29 record in Big East games, plus 3-3 in the Big East tournament. Neptune was 8-13 against Top-25 opposition.

He also lost both of his postseason games, at Liberty in the first round of the 2023 NIT and at home to VCU in 2024 in the same tournament.

Neptune had been an assistant for Wright from 2013-21, including both national titles in 2016 and 2018. The Brooklyn native left Radnor for a year to take over Fordham in 2021-22, then returned to fill the job vacated by his mentor’s retirement.

Wright’s career finished in the Final Four in 2022, having led the Wildcats to the NCAA tournament in 16 of his final 18 years (plus what would’ve been a 17th had the 2020 tournament not been canceled), and wins in each of his last eight postseasons. From 2014-22, Wright’s Wildcats finished no worse than second in the Big East.

The last time the Wildcats had missed the NCAA Tournament before Neptune’s arrival was 2012. The program hasn’t been out of the NCAA Tournament for three straight seasons since Wright’s first three years in charge, from 2002-04.

Neptune was unable to sustain that success. He went 17-17 in his first season, then 18-16 in Year 2. Villanova finished sixth in the Big East in all three of Neptune’s seasons and never advanced past the quarterfinals.

The team that Neptune inherited in 2022 began the season ranked 16th in the Associated Press Top 25. It dropped out after one week, never to return. The Wildcats started the 2023-24 season 22nd, dropped out, rose as high as 18th behind a title in the Battle 4 Atlantis but fell out again by early December.

Neptune’s Villanova career began with five straight losses to ranked opposition in 2022-23. That team caught a second wind too late, with consecutive wins over Xavier and Creighton, but a loss to the Blue Jays in the quarterfinals of the Big East Tournament ended their NCAA Tournament aspirations.

Atlantis and a win over No. 14 North Carolina to help the Wildcats to a 6-1 start in 2023-24 was the high-water mark of the Neptune era. It came crashing down with losses to Saint Joseph’s and Drexel. A win over ranked Creighton around Christmas proved a false dawn.

Similarly, Neptune’s third season brought a stretch of eight wins in nine games around the New Year, including over No. 14 Cincinnati and No. 9 UConn. But a 1-5 stretch followed, squandering winnable games that would ultimately come back to bite them. Villanova was 4-1 against top-25 opposition this year after Neptune had going 4-12 against them in the previous two seasons.

In fairness, Neptune’s challenge was much different than his predecessor’s. In an era of free movement through the transfer portal and NIL money, Villanova has struggled to keep up. Wright’s success was predicated on recruiting, retaining and improving talent over multiple years; Eric Dixon’s rise from a freshman redshirt to a chance to become the program’s all-time leading scorer over six years is the only such benefit Neptune reaped.

Instead, he’s effectively coached three different teams in three years, with Dixon and Jordan Longino the only constants. Neptune underachieved with the remnants of the Final Four team in his first season, though injuries to Justin Moore and Cam Whitmore contributed. Whitmore became Villanova’s first one-and-done in nearly three decades, which led to a raft of transfer arrivals – Hakim Hart, TJ Bamba, Tyler Burton, Lance Ware – the next year. That team never coalesced in its tight window, with some as grad transfers or COVID fifth-years. Some moved on as easily as they arrived, and in came more new faces in 2024 – Wooga Poplar, Jhamir Brickus, Tyler Perkins – with only marginal improvement.

Nardi brings a big stock of institutional knowledge, a standout from 2003-07 with the Elite Eight team in 2006. After a brief playing career in Europe, he’s been an assistant for Villanova since 2017.