College Football: Sticking together on defense has Villanova in FCS semifinal

RADNOR — The details and the time scales differed. But the conversations among the Villanova football team always retained a similar tone.

Whether the score was 0-0 at halftime of the FCS second-round game at Lehigh, or trailing 14-0 seven and a half minutes into last week’s quarterfinal at Tarleton State, or licking their wounds from a second straight concession of 50 points to find themselves 1-2 in mid-September, calm resolve was what Mark Ferrante exhorted from his group.

It has, occasionally this season, taken time for the Wildcats to get going. Sometimes that has been within games. Sometimes that’s within a season, especially for a defensive unit that counts seven redshirt freshmen and four sophomores among its two-deep chart.

But the team’s cohesion has helped it navigate whatever ways that sluggishness might manifest.

“We have a group where we never turn on each other, whatever the score may be,” graduate student defensive lineman Obinna Nwobodo said this week. “And when we were down 14 to Tarleton, we never flinched. So 100 percent, that patience, that camaraderie that we have has definitely led us this far, and it’s definitely not going to change anytime soon.”

The resilience, especially on defense, has led Villanova to its first Division I semifinal since 2010. The 12th seed has the honor of hosting Saturday night, with Illinois State coming to town (7:30, ESPN).

Villanova has gotten here thanks to its defense. And that has taken time.

Plot it along whatever time scale you want. Villanova (12-2) started the season with a 1-2 record, giving up 52 points at a not-yet-freefalling Penn State and 51 at Monmouth. It eked out a 31-24 win over William and Mary the next week to right the ship.

In those first four games, the Wildcats allowed an average of 36 points per game. In 10 games since, all wins, they’re averaging 14 ppg allowed, including just five touchdowns in 12 quarters of playoff football.

Much of that is down to life in FCS.

The Wildcats entered the season with veteran cores to the line, like the Delco Christian grad Nwobodo, and at linebacker, led by longtime fixtures Shane Hartzell and Richie Kimmel (Archbishop Carroll). The secondary, however, was mostly new, and where many of those 11 players in their first two years reside.

Couple that with the numbers-mandated imperative to avoid injuries in preseason that limits tackling drills, and it’s not unusual for a Ferrante defense to start the season on the slow side. Time is a resource that the Wildcats can’t fudge, but they’ve used a growing continuity to make the most of it.

“I think each and every week, our defense and offense and special teams have all just played a little bit better each and every week,” Ferrante said, “because they’ve played together longer.”

The defense has come on strong within games. Villanova’s three playoff wins have run the gamut: a big lead to defend against Harvard; a 0-0 game at halftime against Lehigh before a 14-7 victory; a 14-0 deficit in the blink of an eye at Tarleton State before holding them to seven points the rest of the way in a 26-21 victory.

“Just keep getting better each week,” Nwobodo said of the young guys. “We’re this far because of them. I told them, it’s because of them, not because of us, the older guys who have been here for so long. They’ve just kept working each week. We haven’t looked back.”

The margins bear it out. Villanova is, for the season, negative in point differential in the first quarter. But they’re plus-76 in the second quarter (it’s plus-90 if you exclude Penn State and constrain it to FCS opponents) and plus-72 after halftime (plus-97 vs. FCS). Since William & Mary started an 11-game winning streak, the Wildcats have allowed just one other team to reach 24 points in regulation (Stony Brook, which they beat 30-27 in OT).

Last week’s win over Tarleton State may have been the best one yet, and it fit the pattern. The fourth-seeded Texans led 14-0 early, thanks to an interception and a blocked punt. For a team that entered averaging an FBS-best 44 points per game, that was a recipe for disaster.

But the Wildcats allowed just one scoring drive the rest of the way, with five punts and one red-zone stop in the fourth quarter.

“We saw what happened in the first quarter, and we’re just like, all right, let’s lock it in here and go do what we do,” Nwobodo said. “And that’s what we ended up doing after the halfway point in the first quarter. You just go out there and play. It’s just, let’s go out here and get one stop, go out here and get a stop, and keep doing that.”

“The thing I like about this team is, not only their togetherness and all the things they’re doing there from being great teammates, being unselfish, all those things,” Ferrante said. “The other thing that I’ve really noticed, regardless of where we are in the game — if we’re up, if it’s tied, if we’re trailing — they seem to stay focused. They seem to stay locked in. There’s no blame, there’s no finger-pointing, there’s no complaining, there’s no panic.

“It’s all just a bunch of guys saying, OK, we’ve got 30 more minutes to go out there and try to pull this thing out and let’s show people who the better team is.”

That’ll be the recipe again this week against Illinois State, a team that had already pulled three upsets on the road against seeded teams in this tournament.

“I think we just have a lot of guys who stick together through the good, through the bad,” Nwobodo said. “Especially last year, our defense was super tight knit. So we’re trying to keep it the same way, not only from this year, but for years to come. Just never folding on each other.”