Villanova continues to trend in the wrong direction. It needs to turn things around fast.

BALTIMORE — It’s early, Eric Dixon said.

Friday night’s Hall of Fame Series loss to Virginia, 70-60 at CFG Bank Arena, was Villanova’s fifth regular-season game. There are 26 to go.

Early? Sure. But it gets late fast for bad college basketball teams. Through the second weekend of the season, there’s little evidence that this Villanova team is anything else. The Wildcats are 2-3 for the second time in three seasons. Before 2022, they hadn’t lost three of their first five games since 1997.

Historical stats, even as recently as 2022, are meaningless numbers in the transient world of major college sports. Fair.

Friday, though, featured some of the same problems that have persisted through two seasons and five games for the Wildcats under Kyle Neptune. The Wildcats lack playmaking, ballhandling, shot creators, shot makers, and, worst of all, they seem to lack a plan.

In the early moments Friday, it looked like Villanova would quickly put Tuesday’s loss to St. Joseph’s in the rearview. The Wildcats scored nine of the first 11 points, but then Virginia scored 18 of the next 20 and Villanova scored just two points during an 8-minute, 59-second stretch. The Wildcats never got closer than five, and that only happened because of a seven-point burst of life in the final 45 seconds of the first half.

Virginia shot lights-out from three-point range. The Cavaliers made 14 of their 25 three-pointers, and threes made up 56% of their made shots. A few of them were tough shots, especially as Isaac McKneely, who scored a game-high 23 points, got into a rhythm. But too many of them weren’t contested well enough. Villanova played a lot of drop coverage with center Enoch Boakye, and Virginia made the Wildcats pay.

Villanova trailed by as much as 18 late in the second half.

Friday also showed a glaring problem for Villanova: Its best ballhandler and offense creator not named Dixon is Jhamir Brickus, who hasn’t showed the ability to contest shots at a high enough level. When he’s not on the court, though, the offense becomes one-dimensional and relies heavily on Dixon and others playing one-on-one.

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Very little went right. Villanova turned the ball over 13 times after piling up 16 on Tuesday night and a dozen during last week’s home loss to Columbia. The Wildcats do have six new players in the rotation, but it’s not like they just started practicing together last week.

“I think one thing that’s hurt us is ball movement and turnovers, some timely turnovers that we just got to get better at,” Neptune said. “I think our guys are still learning each other. We got to get more cohesive, but that’s hurting us in key moments.”

This is the type of start that would make a coach question everything.

“Yeah,” Neptune said, appearing to agree with the premise that Villanova needs to go back to the drawing board. But then the coach speak started. “Obviously we got to get better. We got to get a lot better. Virginia is a good team. They’re a high-level team, well-coached, very disciplined. So there’s no shame in going into that game and not getting the results we want. But I think there’s a lot of things we have to get better at and we have to get better at them quickly.”

Virginia, playing under a new head coach after Tony Bennett abruptly retired, entered Friday night as KenPom’s 94th-ranked team in college basketball. Yes, that same metrics site projected Villanova 20th nationally to start the season, but this isn’t a great Virginia team by any account. Villanova entered the game as a small favorite, according to the oddsmakers, which seemingly rely on some of those same metrics sites to make their lines.

These five games, though, have been a win for the eye test crowd.

“Obviously, everyone wants to come out and start hot, but that’s just not the luxury that we have,” said Dixon, who led Villanova with 20 points. “At the end of the day, it’s just coming back and trying to figure out a way to get better. This early in the season, that’s all it is.”

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The problem, though, is there doesn’t seem to be a clear path to getting there. A one-game sample size was enough of an excuse to shoo aside the Columbia loss. Five games is a trend. The most optimistic of prognosticators could look at the rest of the nonconference schedule and game out Villanova at something like 7-4 entering the 20-game Big East slate.

Does this really look like a team that’s going to win enough games in that conference to get on the right side of the NCAA Tournament bubble?

It’s an important benchmark and question only because of the context. Neptune has failed to reach the tournament in his first two seasons, and it’s hard to imagine — especially with a new athletic director on the way — he’ll be allowed a fourth season should this one end like the previous two.

“All I can focus on right now is trying to prepare our team for our next game and trying to make sure that we put ourselves in the best position to be the best team we can be at the end of the year,” Neptune said.

Five games indeed is a trend. But more importantly for Neptune, so are the 73 games he’s coached at Villanova. In that respect, it’s anything but early, and it gets late more quickly this time of year.