As Villanova goes through a period of transition, Eric Dixon has a chance at history, asterisk or not
Dixon needs nine points to pass Kerry Kittles and become the all-time leading scorer at Villanova.
The least interesting thing about Villanova during the last two weeks is that the men’s basketball season isn’t over yet.
Villanova exited the Big East tournament on the day of the quarterfinals for the third year in a row. It fired Kyle Neptune less than 48 hours later, and a two-week coaching search that featured Kevin Willard’s very public drama ended Sunday morning with Willard’s exit from the University of Maryland and his hiring at Villanova.
The transfer portal opened last week, and while there was uncertainty about the future of the program and its players before the coaching search and even after, the 2024-25 Wildcats, under interim coach Mike Nardi, still have basketball to play.
Villanova tips off Tuesday at the inaugural College Basketball Crown tournament, which started Monday in Las Vegas. Think of it as the NIT but mostly for the sport’s major conferences and Fox’s television partners with some name, image, and likeness funds going to the teams that make it to the final rounds — an icky descriptor for many. The Wildcats start Tuesday with Colorado (8:30 p.m., FS1), and a win would put them in the quarterfinals to meet the winner of Tulane and Southern California.
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Not interested yet? You can’t be blamed. It’s Final Four week, and most of the rest of the sport has already moved on to next season. More than 1,500 players are in the transfer portal, and while Willard will be in Vegas on Tuesday hanging around his new team, his focus is on getting players to replace a starting five that is out of eligibility. But perhaps the best and maybe the only reason to be interested in Tuesday night is the chance to see history. Villanova forward Eric Dixon, the nation’s leading scorer this season at 23 points per game, is eight points from tying and nine points from topping Kerry Kittles’ all-time scoring record at Villanova, one that has stood for nearly 30 years.
Dixon, who arrived at Villanova as a redshirt in 2019, has accumulated 2,235 points. He has gone from little-used redshirt freshman to four-year starter and college basketball star.
“It’s not something I really ever imagined being a possibility for me,” Dixon said last week.
There are some, the basketball purists especially, who might wish it weren’t, who will want to put an asterisk next to Dixon’s name, and they do have an argument. Dixon, 24, is playing his fifth season of college hoops thanks to the extra year of eligibility athletes were given during the pandemic. Thursday night will be his 160th game in a Villanova uniform — a program record — while Kittles played only 122. The scoring record will likely fall in a made-up tournament more than two weeks after the Wildcats played a meaningful game. Asterisks galore.
“That’s fine,” Dixon said of the asterisk makers. “For games played, all that kind of stuff. I don’t know what to tell them. I’m lucky enough to be in this position. If I go out there and I get it, I’m not going to let anybody else diminish it because of whatever they think, however they feel about it. At the end of the day, I put a lot of time in here. I put in a lot of effort, and for me to be up there would be great.”
Dixon was then given a counterargument to try. Sure, Dixon will have played 38 more games than Kittles after Tuesday night, but he’ll enter Tuesday’s game with 59 fewer total minutes played than Kittles.
“I don’t know if that’s really good for me,” Dixon responded. “How many more games I got and I’ve played less minutes? I still might want to leave that out. That’s a lot of DNPs [did not play], a lot of two- or three-minute showings. I might just leave that one off the table.”
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But, as Nardi later pointed out, there are talks about adding a fifth year of eligibility for college athletes in the future. “It’ll help out his argument,” he said.
Nardi, who played at Villanova and joined the coaching staff in 2015, has seen Dixon’s entire transformation from a star at Abington High School to this.
“It’s pretty incredible,” Nardi said. “If you look through the numbers and his jump from each season, it’s just a credit to his hard work and dedication. He’s been the hardest worker on most of the teams that he’s been on and he’s played with some great players. And then also I think it’s pretty special for him having stayed here for this long in an era where everyone has different opportunities — and so did he coming into last year and this year, and he chose to come back to Villanova because he loves it here and he appreciates the community.
“I think he knows what type of player Kerry Kittles was here and I think he respects that. He’s a local guy, so he has watched Villanova basketball a long time and I think he knows how special that is, breaking Kerry Kittles’ record.”
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Dixon has said publicly a few times this season that the record wasn’t something he was chasing. No one could have blamed him for opting out of the event and focusing on the NBA draft, but Dixon said he was going to continue to take pride in putting on a Villanova uniform. “If there are games to play, I’ll play,” he said a few days after the season effectively ended in the Big East tournament.
That pride is what’s been driving Dixon and senior forward Jordan Longino, they said, as they’ve helped keep things together during the last awkward couple of weeks of practice leading up to the Crown. There’s the bonus of Dixon putting his name in the history books, too, and Longino, a Doylestown native, would certainly like to see it.
“I’ve seen the work that Eric has put in,” he said. “Obviously I knew him when I was in high school, so I’ve kind of followed his journey. He’s just an unbelievable player, unbelievable talent, even better leader, a better guy off the court. Mad respect and obviously I want him to be able to reach that goal. I know it’s something he wants to reach as well.”
Even if he doesn’t say it?
“He’ll never say it,” Longino said with a smile. “But we know. We know.”