New Villanova coach Kevin Willard on summer workouts and the possibility of post-House stabilizing

The first of two parts after The Inquirer sat down with new Villanova men’s basketball coach Kevin Willard for a wide-ranging interview.

Kevin Willard sat next to Fran Dunphy a few summers ago at a recruiting event. Willard, the son of a coach, loves asking his peers what they do and why they do it, so Willard asked Dunphy how he approached his summer workout sessions and learned that Dunphy loved evaluating his team by watching it play three-on-three.

Americans, Dunphy explained, aren’t taught the merits of three-on-three basketball. In five-on-five hoops, the best players usually shoot. In three-on-three, everyone touches the ball. Everyone shoots. Everyone cuts. Everyone passes.

Willard, who is on the floor this month with his new Villanova team for the first time, has said he wants Villanova to play a different style. He wants the Wildcats, who have played at a slow pace the last few seasons, to play faster, and three-on-three, especially when it’s full-court, forces the tempo.

Willard said he first introduced three-on-three to his summer program in a big way last season. His Maryland team was coming off a 16-win season and had some new faces.

“My team loved it,” said Willard, who led the Terrapins to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament before leaving for Villanova. “I thought it helped us dramatically. It helped me because I could also see who plays well together, who doesn’t play well together. Three-on-three exposes a lot of stuff.”

There’s a lot to suss out this summer. The Wildcats are returning just two scholarship players from last season’s roster, and only one of them, Tyler Perkins, actually saw the floor during Kyle Neptune’s third and final season as Villanova’s coach. Willard and his staff brought in 11 new players, eight of whom came via the transfer portal while three are incoming freshmen.

Although three of those players were with Willard as reserves at Maryland last season, and another is an incoming freshman who followed Willard to the Main Line, count this month’s summer workouts as Willard’s real introduction to the roster Villanova spent more than two months building.

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When Willard entered last portal season, he did so knowing he had Derik Queen, a 6-foot-10 big man who was a top recruit in the 2024 class, and Julian Reese, a 6-9 senior who spent his whole college career at Maryland. Those were real building blocks, and with all respect to Perkins and redshirt freshman Matthew Hodge, Villanova wasn’t going to have that kind of head start.

Willard at least had a plan.

“I wanted a really balanced roster that is going to be good, but also, for the most part, bringing good young kids with talent who I think we can build this program and win another championship by retaining,” he said. “It’s much easier to retain than to acquire.”

Retention? In this economy? The idea of bringing players back for multiple seasons in the transfer portal era has been aspirational, but Villanova’s 2025-26 roster has just three players whose eligibility will be exhausted after this season and eight players with three or more seasons left.

“I think retention is going to be the most important thing in college basketball moving forward, and if you don’t have good young talent, [if] you don’t have good young players, you can’t retain,” Willard said.

“What I’ve seen over the last two years, as this has all gone crazy, is the teams that have been able to retain and build with those guys, and then maybe add a really important piece, are the ones that have had the most success.”

How much will previous seasons be a barometer moving forward? It remains to be seen. Some stabilization could be on the way in the aftermath of the landmark House settlement that will dramatically change college sports as we know them.

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Rodney Rice was one of Willard’s best players last season at Maryland, in Rice’s first full season in college basketball. He shot 37.4% from three-point range and scored 13.8 points per game. When Willard left Maryland for Villanova, Rice entered the portal and considered following Willard — he even took a visit to Villanova as he weighed his options.

Rice, of course, ended up at Southern California, where he reportedly received more than $3 million. Willard would not go into specifics about how much money Villanova spent on its 2025-26 roster, though he did say the starting number jumped up based on market movement. But for the sake of conversation, let’s say Villanova’s roster spending is in the $7 million to $8 million range. Would allocating more than $3 million to Rice have been good spending?

“I think as a general manager, sometimes you have to look around and see what your total pool is, your total pot,” Willard said. “That’s part of the deal now. … That was a decision that I just thought spending a lot of money on one guy was not where I thought this roster was at.”

This offseason was Willard’s first working with a general manager like Baker Dunleavy. Roster decisions were Willard’s, he said, but he relied on Dunleavy to negotiate with agents and deal with the contracts. Dunleavy sat in Willard’s office with the rest of the staff and watched hours of film on prospective players.

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It was another offseason with more than 2,000 Division I men’s basketball players in the portal. But it might have been the last offseason with this kind of financial volatility.

“It all depends on whether the clearinghouse has teeth or not,” Willard said when asked about that possibility.

He’s referring to the House settlement requiring athletes to declare third-party name, image, and likeness deals worth at least $600 to a new clearinghouse. Managed by Deloitte, NIL Go will audit and manage outside NIL deals to determine their legitimacy.

It is the one mechanism standing between Villanova and the Big East competing with the Alabamas and Floridas of the world in the future. The House settlement caps department-wide athlete revenue sharing at $20.5 million, and big football schools are going to spend a large chunk of their money on their football rosters. For the sake of using ballpark figures, SEC and Big Ten basketball teams will have about $4 million to $5 million to spend on their men’s basketball programs, a number Villanova and its Big East peers can top, despite their comparative size.

Outside NIL deals will make up the difference for power conference schools, but the clearinghouse needs to, as Willard says, have “teeth” to not allow for widespread pay-for-play that boosts the basketball budget for big football schools beyond the pale.

“If the clearinghouse has teeth, then the amount of money is just going to come down drastically,” Willard said of offseason spending that has bloated in recent years. “I think everyone in college sports wants the clearinghouse to actually have teeth because you can get back to kids getting real, true NIL deals and then we can have profit-sharing, which is probably where it should go.”

It could lead to an enhanced ability to retain players, too.

There was a race this offseason to get massive NIL deals done before the House settlement was finalized. A handful of schools reportedly have spent more than $10 million on their basketball rosters, and while Villanova probably spent seven figures and not eight — “our roster could cost dramatically less,” Willard said. Meanwhile … “we still might be able to pay more than anyone else.”

This was part of the reason Willard ended up at Villanova in the first place. Maryland is in the big-time football business. Villanova isn’t.

If the Dukes and Kentuckys and Marylands of the world can’t supplement their revenue-sharing dollars with influxes of outside NIL deals, you’ll see fewer basketball teams spending $15 million on a roster. You’ll see Big East teams, not burdened by football, on a more level playing field. The big bucks simply will evaporate from the market, and the cost of doing business will drop.

“If all those dollars go away and no one has any money to spend, prices come down,” Willard said.

Like anything else these days in his sport, it will have to be seen to be believed. For now, there’s plenty of three-on-three to watch.

Thursday: A look at Willard’s exit from Maryland, his progress so far at Villanova, and his expectations in the short and long term.