Eric Dixon, Jordan Longino, and the end of an era for Villanova basketball: Can they go out with a bang?
Dixon and Longino are two of the few remaining elements from Jay Wright’s former program.
Eric Dixon has been down this road before. Last season was supposed to be his final one at Villanova before he started a professional career. He has already felt some of the emotions, and so he playfully joked before Villanova’s last home game about the circumstances, the final home game, and the forthcoming Big East tournament.
“I think I’ve had three last home games now,” Dixon said. “This place has been good to me. It’s something I’m going to try not to think about too much.
“I think this year I’ll be a little bit more focused on just trying to get the job done.”
The job will be a difficult one. Villanova (18-13, 11-9 Big East) enters the conference tournament on the wrong side of the NCAA Tournament bubble with no clear path to an at-large bid. The Wildcats will either need to win the whole thing or miss out on the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive season. The times, they have changed since Dixon arrived on Villanova’s campus as a redshirt freshman in 2019, when Villanova dominated the Big East. But Jay Wright is gone, and so much about the sport has made the previous era of Villanova basketball almost obsolete in a matter of three years.
There is real apathy among Villanova fans, and Wildcats coach Kyle Neptune heads to Madison Square Garden as questions swirl about his future leading the program.
But for Willow Grove’s Dixon and Doylestown’s Jordan Longino, this week’s Big East tournament is a last dance barring a miracle run. There are five scholarship players on Villanova’s roster who will exhaust their eligibility after this season, but Dixon and Longino stand out because of their uniqueness in a sport that has rapidly changed in front of their eyes. Dixon’s journey from redshirt to star has been well-documented. He leads the nation in scoring at 23.6 points per game and is just 36 points away from passing Kerry Kittles and becoming the school’s all-time leading scorer (with an added asterisk, since this is Dixon’s fifth season playing college basketball, an opportunity afforded because of the pandemic).
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Longino, meanwhile, has rarely been fully healthy until this season. He was injured as a freshman role player before Villanova made its run to the 2022 Final Four and battled through leg ailments for the next two seasons before breaking out as a senior. He has started all 31 games this season and has career highs in points per game (11.8) and three-point shooting percentage (36.7%).
“I’m just thankful for the journey,” Longino said. “I think I could find positives in a lot of the injuries, the rehab, playing and not playing. It’s built a lot of mental strength in me. Being at the point I am now where I feel like I’m finally playing my last basketball, finally where I want to be.
“Better late than never.”
That will be the motto this week for the Wildcats, who always talk about being the best team they can be by season’s end. In a season with ups and downs, with bad losses and solid wins, Villanova allowed another lead to slip away last week at Georgetown to stop a three-game winning streak and send the Wildcats to the conference tournament on a sour note.
They have shown flashes, and their path to cutting down the nets starts Wednesday (9 p.m.) against Seton Hall. Next up would be a UConn team that Villanova beat at home and coughed up a 14-point second-half lead to on the road. Then would likely be a Creighton team that needed a banked-in three-pointer to beat Villanova at the Wells Fargo Center on the first day of February. Get past the Bluejays, and top-seeded St. John’s, with which Villanova split the season series, could stand between the Wildcats and an improbable championship.
It sounds a bit too good to be true because it’s a far-fetched proposition. But Dixon at least gives Villanova a puncher’s chance, and Longino has, as Neptune said, “paid the price” to become a reliable two-way player who often guards the opposing team’s best player.
More than that, though, Dixon and Longino have represented stability for a young head coach in a sport that quickly has made that concept old-fashioned.
“Having players who have been in your program is always valuable,” Neptune said. “Having players that have been in your program for multiple years is even more valuable. Having players who have been in your program and have had success is the ultimate. That’s what those guys are. They’ve had success here and they’ve produced. They’ve also done everything here. They’ve started, not started, been a role player, been a stud. They’ve done everything. So there’s nothing any young guy can say or a situation that they haven’t been through. I think that’s extremely valuable for any coach or any program.
“They’ve been unbelievable ambassadors to the university and our program.”
Their absences will be felt next year, no matter who is doing the coaching. Dixon’s legacy could end with him being the all-time leading scorer, a player who modeled Wright’s old way of long-term development. Longino’s? “I just want everybody to be able to say Jordan Longino gave his all,” he said. “That’s it.”
Dixon has experienced the highs. He was a starting redshirt sophomore on the 2022 Final Four team and hit a critical three-pointer in a second-round win over Ohio State. But Wright retired after that season, and while Dixon has taken off as a scorer, team success has not been replicated. Would another missed NCAA Tournament make the last few seasons a disappointment?
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“I wouldn’t say so,” Dixon said. “We do a good job talking about trying to be the best team we can be by the end. For me, as a leader, my guys from the past teams, we still have good relationships. They still reach out to me. We still have respect for each other, and we still appreciate what we did together. NCAA, NIT, obviously you want NCAA, but for me, I know that every teammate I’ve had has given 100% of themselves. So I can’t say we try to be the best team that we can by the end, win or lose, and just because we lost it’s a disappointment. I don’t think that way.
“You have lofty expectations, but I’m not going to sit there and say it was a waste of a year or a disappointment or anything like that.”
What about for Longino, who was on the 2022 team but was injured and couldn’t play? This season has marked a personal triumph, but ...
“Obviously everybody who ever played college basketball wants to play in the NCAA Tournament,” he said. “That would be a blessing. But for us, I don’t take it as a disappointment. We’ve had a lot of high moments, a lot of positives. If we end up not making it, we’re going to take those positives, we’re going to cherish them, and I’m going to be blessed just to get through another year of college basketball.”
The end for both Villanova lifers is nearing. Perhaps it comes after an unlikely run to the NCAA Tournament. More likely, it ends at the latest made-up postseason tournament, the College Basketball Crown in Las Vegas. Wherever it happens, Dixon and Longino will carry with them some of the last of Wright’s fingerprints on the program, the last of a bygone era at Villanova, and in their sport.
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“Loyalty has always been a thing I’ve been built on,” Longino said. “My parents instilled it in me at a young age. I love it here. Off the court, I love the community. On the court, I love the coaching staff and my teammates. This is a hard place to leave. I wanted to be here, committed to this program, committed to what Coach Wright and Coach Neptune promised my family. They’ve held to that promise.”
He and Dixon held up their ends, too.