PHILADELPHIA -- Alabama reached the men’s basketball Final Four and had 11 players in the transfer portal as of Friday afternoon. Duke reached the Elite Eight and then watched seven players submit their names to leave the program. Rutgers may have the best incoming recruiting class in its hoops history, but the Scarlet Knights are likely saying goodbye to at least eight players in the portal.

Locally in men’s basketball, the top five scorers at La Salle went into the portal. Temple’s top three scorers and Drexel’s top two, too. St. Joseph’s has seen players exit and arrive. And Penn lost two to an Ivy League rule that doesn’t allow graduate students to play, and another, freshman Tyler Perkins, who left for Villanova after a standout freshman year in part because the Ivy League doesn’t have the name, image, and likeness capabilities to keep him around.

Show those two paragraphs to a college hoops fan just five or 10 years ago and wait for the puzzling look heading back your way. Show it to a Villanova season-ticket holder in the euphoric prime of Jay Wright’s 21 seasons leading the Wildcats, and wait for the laugh and the retort. Never gonna happen here. Can’t. Won’t.

Yep, it has happened here. It has happened everywhere. The 45 days after the college basketball regular season wraps up have become a free agency frenzy with the existence of the portal and NIL. It’s fantasy basketball with a salary cap, except every school and NIL collective has a different salary cap number. It is the Wild West. Anything goes.

For Villanova, the last two years have been full of change, first Wright’s retirement leading to the hiring of Kyle Neptune. The coaching change came as the game was changing rapidly. And athletic director Mark Jackson reacted by bringing in old friend Baker Dunleavy to serve as general manager for the men’s and women’s basketball programs. All the while, Friends of Nova, the NIL collective that supports Villanova athletics, has built what executive director Randy Foye likes to call a “war chest” of resources to keep Villanova in the top tier of college hoops.

The result has been less than stellar. Neptune’s Wildcats are 35-33 over the last two seasons, and the team’s four-player transfer portal haul from last offseason didn’t leave supporters feeling confident in Villanova’s ability to attract the right type of talent to be successful in the ever-changing landscape.

The Villanova Way of the past is gone, and a new world is here.

“First and foremost, we’re not happy with where we are the last couple years,” Neptune said. “Me, our staff, we know what this place stands for and what the tradition has been.

“College basketball has become very transient. You look at successful teams, teams that have gone far in the tournament, they have multiple guys leaving. I don’t know how we can look at ourselves and say we’re above that. It just hasn’t happened in the past here at Villanova and I understand that it’s new for this place. But some teams have entire rosters in the portal and it’s just kind of the new day of college basketball and it’s on us to navigate that — my job is to navigate that.”

He has no other choice. Villanova is losing four players to expiring eligibility, another four to the transfer portal, and could lose two more to either the NBA draft or the portal. A roster overhaul is underway, and what happens over the next four to five weeks will go a long way in determining the immediate future of the program.

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