Villanova’s NCAA Tournament chances are slim. A decision looms for the school’s president and new AD.

The charts say Villanova is back on the NCAA Tournament bubble. The reality says sort of.

The Wildcats have won three consecutive games and six of their last eight. They have put themselves back in the postseason discussion, but their position on the bubble relative to the hill they would need to climb makes it all seem quite unrealistic.

After its 80-70 win over Butler on Saturday, Villanova remained eight spots out of ESPN bracket guru Joe Lunardi’s projected field of 68 tournament teams. That’s where the Wildcats started Saturday, even though two of the teams just ahead of them on the board, Cincinnati and Southern Methodist, suffered defeats that day. What gives? You get very little credit for beating a team you’re supposed to beat by the amount you’re supposed to beat them by. The Wildcats were favored by around seven points. They won by 10. Yawn.

They are now 18-12 and 11-8 in the Big East, with one regular-season game remaining Tuesday night at Georgetown. There have been good wins and bad losses. Late-game collapses and complete no-shows.

Perhaps there is a sliver of hope.

The path looks something like this: Tuesday is a must-win game. Then the Wildcats would head to the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden needing to, at the very least, get to the tournament final. As it stands, Villanova would be the sixth seed in the tournament. Assuming it gets by either DePaul or Seton Hall in the preliminary round, Villanova would then need to stack together consecutive wins against (most likely) two of Marquette, Creighton, and Connecticut before potentially meeting top-seeded St. John’s in the final. Win that one, and all of this is moot. Lose that one, and the bubble may still burst for what would be a 22-win team.

Asked Friday what Villanova’s case would be to receive an at-large bid, coach Kyle Neptune obviously focused on the good while knowing the resumé deserved some scrutiny.

“I think we’ve been right there with some of the best teams in the country,” he said. “We’ve beaten some of the best teams in the country. We’ll see. I think we have some work to do here. We’ll see how it goes in the end.”

The at-large path is iffy. Metrics master Bart Torvik had Villanova at 5.8% to get to the tournament via an at-large bid as of Sunday and just 4.7% to run the table at the Garden. The math overwhelmingly says Villanova will miss the tournament for the third consecutive season under Neptune, and that means Neptune’s bosses — president Peter M. Donohue and new athletic director Eric Roedl — are just two weeks away from making a decision about the future of the program.

Maybe those wheels are already turning and have been since Roedl took over in January. On his first road trip with the team, he watched Villanova cough up a late lead at Xavier before an even worse collapse six days later at home, where Villanova let an eight-point lead against Georgetown slip away in barely more than two minutes.

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The surface-level numbers are in Neptune’s favor. Villanova will likely win 20 or more games for the first time under him. The Wildcats are second nationally in three-point and free-throw shooting percentages. They have the 20th-most efficient offense in the country, according to KenPom, and the nation’s leading scorer, Eric Dixon. They have wins over St. John’s, Connecticut, and Marquette. They have played the entire season without Matthew Hodge, the top member of the 2024 high school recruiting class.

But those numbers ignore important context, and the tale of the numbers will likely be what guides the decision makers when it comes time to move forward. Villanova’s record is inflated by an easy schedule by the program’s normal standards. Five of its victories have come against teams ranked 285th or worse by KenPom’s overall adjusted efficiency metric. That efficient offense led by a 24-year-old super-duper senior has often been negated by a defense ranked 113th. Twenty wins sounds good on the surface, but how many of the 12 losses should have been wins? Five?

Even if three of them were wins — not a crazy leap given how some of the games played out — this conversation may not be necessary. Villanova would be comfortably in the tournament and Neptune would probably be on his way to earning a fourth season and maybe a contract extension.

Alas, the margins are slim and the Wildcats are where they are. They may need an almost entirely new starting five next season, and Donohue and Roedl will need to decide if Neptune is the coach to lead another roster turnover, and if Villanova’s brand can still attract the type of players needed to win under the current staff. The expectation at Villanova, even in the new world of college sports, is to win, and three consecutive missed tournaments isn’t living up to the standard.

» READ MORE: Villanova has a new AD and likely a more bottom-line approach to men’s basketball. Kyle Neptune should be on guard.

It’s hard to argue against moving in a new direction, and it’s hard to argue that Neptune, if his fate isn’t already determined, isn’t coaching every game for his future.

“I try not to think about it that way,” Neptune said. “This is the journey of this season, and we just have to keep grinding until the last possible moment we have together.

“For me, right now, my focus is on these guys, trying to help support them as much as we possibly can and try to prepare them as much as we possibly can for each game. Any other emotion or feeling doesn’t really help our guys. It doesn’t help me. So we’re focused on trying to prepare them and giving everything we have for them.”

To his credit, the recent record shows a team that hasn’t quit, and his recent actions show a coach who isn’t resigned to being fired. There are, of course, more games to play. More time to make up for past failures.

“It really matters at the end where you are, and we say it all the time, we’re trying to be the best team we can be by the end,” Neptune said. “We’ll see what our body of work looks like in the end. I think we have a lot of opportunities here over these next couple weeks.”

He was talking about his team, but the same sentiment applies to him.