Kevin Willard calls Philadelphia Inquirer reporter ‘a bad writer’ in rant that confirms reporting on Villanova’s Big 5 exit

Villanova men’s basketball coach Kevin Willard used his press conference following his team’s 93-71 exhibition loss to Virginia to tell the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Jeff Neiburg that his story about Villanova’s exit from the Big 5 was false and that he was a bad writer, then went on to confirm nearly every detail Neiburg had reported.

Neiburg’s story, published Thursday morning, revealed that Philadelphia’s Big 5 is moving on without Villanova after the six schools failed to agree on a format beyond this season. Since 1955, Villanova, Penn, Temple, La Salle, and Saint Joseph’s have faced one another every season for an unofficial city championship, playing a full round robin for nearly seven decades in a series long associated with Penn’s Palestra.

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Villanova has won 30 of those titles, more than any other school, including last season’s, while Temple sits second with 28.

As interest in the series waned, the schools revamped the event in 2023, adding Drexel as a sixth member and splitting the teams into two three-team pods. Each school plays its two pod opponents, one at home and one on the road, and the pod standings determine the matchups for the Big 5 Classic, a one-day tripleheader at Xfinity Mobile Arena where the first-place teams meet for the championship. Attendance at the Classic has declined each year since, falling from more than 15,000 in 2023 to just over 14,000 in 2024 and 10,361 last December, roughly half the arena’s capacity, as the Inquirer noted.

The three-year agreement governing the format expires after this season, and Villanova had no desire to commit to another cycle under the same terms, which is why Willard and the school lobbied for an alternative arrangement that the other five programs ultimately balked at.

And while all of the reporting, from Neiburg’s sourcing on Villanova’s proposal to the five schools’ joint statement announcing they would move forward without the Wildcats, points the finger at Villanova, the program’s head coach…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/kevin-willard-calls-philadelphia-inquirer-163034162.html

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Publish date : 2026-10-23 16:30:00

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