Later tonight, Villanova will face Michigan in the third round of the 2022 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament. This is the fourth time in six seasons that Villanova has advanced to the Sweet Sixteen—a run of success made even more impressive by national titles in 2016 and 2018. In the process, Villanova has blossomed into one of the sport’s “prestige” programs, occupying a tier just behind “blue bloods” such as Duke, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Moreover, with longtime Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski retiring at the end of the 2022 tournament, there is now talk that Villanova coach Jay Wright is ready to assume the mantle of “best coach in college basketball.” It is by no means a crazy idea. Among current coaches, only Krzyzewski has more national championships than Wright, and only Rick Pitino (now coaching at Iona, after a series of personal and professional problems) has as many as Wright.
Clearly, then, Wright is an excellent coach. And yet, he seems to get even more praise for the way he runs his program. Last weekend, after Villanova beat Delaware 80-60 in the first round of the tournament, Blue Hens coach Martin Ingelsby remarked:
As I’ve built my program, I’ve tried to model how we do things very similar to how Jay has run his program. They put so much pressure on you on the offensive end with their ability to shoot the basketball. They made 13 3s, but they had four guys that made two or more. And they’re so connected defensively. They’re tough, they’re physical and they know who they are. They’re selfless. They’re at the pedestal. It’s them that you aspire. There are a lot of teams in the country that want to be like Villanova basketball. They’ve got it to the point now that it’s kind of a machine.
A similar assessment was offered by Ohio State coach Chris Holtmann a few days later. Speaking in advance of his team’s second-round matchup against Villanova—a game that Villanova would win handily—Holtmann noted:
They have tremendous buy-in to how they want to play. They’ve got a real toughness to them, always. They just have a real tremendous toughness and an approach that is really tough-minded. They’re physically tough and really tough-minded. It requires great discipline to play a team that is this talented, this well coached and as tough as they are. Just tremendous respect [for Jay Wright]. I’ve stolen so much from him and his program. He has no idea because I didn’t tell him. I just watched his teams and anything that he was doing in terms of teaching, I would take. I, even to this day, have stolen a lot from him. So thanks, Jay.
What’s striking is that both coaches place emphasis on what might be termed Villanova’s “culture.” For example, interlocking terms such as “program,” “selfless,” “connected,” “tough,” and “buy-in” are applied to Villanova basketball. By way of contrast, rarely (if ever) are words such as “superstar,” “glamorous,” “emotional,” “brash” or “raucous” used of Wright’s team. In a manner that resembles Nick Saban’s approach at Alabama, Wright has centered his organization on certain non-negotiable expectations and principles, to which his players are asked to conform. Thus the players, despite assuming different roles, are nevertheless united by shared concepts, goals, and habits:
In games, when all of this comes together, the results are as beautiful as they are admirable. Wright’s team is not just a collection of individual players but, rather, a group of individual players working together as a single unit—like an orchestra.
A couple of days ago, I wrote about a recent interview with author Yuval Levin, who has argued that the current malaise in American politics can be traced back to the failure of our cultural institutions. Instead of forming and guiding individuals, institutions are giving priority to “political correctness” and personal preference. According to Levin, this is a recipe for social decay, since a proper “culture” will be marked by a sense of common formation and purpose. Without revisiting this issue per se, it did remind me of the recent comments about Villanova basketball, especially those relating the program’s achievements to its distinct “culture.” Indeed, perhaps Jay Wright’s program can be said to embody Kierkegaard’s definition of an ideal society:
When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and together are essentially related to the same idea, the relation is optimal and normative. Individually the relation separates them (each one has himself for himself), and ideally it unites them. … The unanimity of separation is indeed fully orchestrated music. … The harmony of the spheres is the unity of each planet relating to itself and to the whole.