2026-27 Big East Women’s Basketball Summer Vibe Check: Villanova Wildcats

Team: Villanova Wildcats

2025-26 Record: 25-8, 16-4 Big East

2025-26 Big East Finish: Second, four games behind UConn, and four games ahead of a tie between Seton Hall and Marquette.

Final 2025-26 Rankings

NET: #35
Her Hoop Stats: #36
BartTorvik.com: #28

Postseason? Villanova toppled Providence and Seton Hall in the Big East tournament for the right to lose by 39 points to UConn in the title game. Their record was good enough to make them the only non-UConn team from the Big East that made it to the NCAA tournament, although they ended up sneaking in as a #10 seed and then took a 57-52 loss to #7 seed Texas Tech in the first round.

Notable Departures: Villanova is losing just one starter from an NCAA tournament team. That’s Denae Carter, who had a senior year remarkably similar to her junior year. 8.6 points per game both seasons, her rebounds dipped a little bit to a very good 5.0 per game but assists went up to 2.2 a night and steals bumped up to 1.5 per contest, too. 21.9 minutes per game as a junior, 20.7 as a senior. She even went out on a high note shooting the ball, getting a career high 52.5% overall to fall but also hitting 10 of her 23 three-point attempts (43.5%) after only trying eight in her three previous seasons of action.

Villanova loses three more rotation players, two of which were seniors and one was a freshman. The seniors are Ryanne Allen and Kylee Watson, and Allen had the bigger role. She appeared in 32 of 33 games and averaged just short of 19 minutes a night. Villanova wasn’t asking Allen to do much, as she averaged 7.7 points, 2.3 rebounds, and just over an assist per game. She did shoot 44% on 3.6 three-pointer attempts per game, and merely having that kind of threat out there for nearly half the game does a lot of work for you on offense. Watson’s season appears to have been hampered by the eight games she missed in November and December. She had been playing double digit minutes in VU’s first four games up to that point, and then she didn’t play double digit minutes again until her 10th and 11th game back. Watson was coming off missing all of 2024-25 with an injury, so you can see how the VU staff was a little bit hesitant with her.

The only unexpected departure from the Villanova roster is MD Ntambue, who has transferred to Loyola Chicago after her first year with the Wildcats. On one hand, there’s nothing wrong with just short of 11 minutes a game in 25 appearances as a freshman and not much adding to the stat sheet along the way. The game log kind of indicates that her minutes were fading a bit as the season went along, so maybe that had something to do with the Quebec native opting to leave the Philly area for Chicago for next season. Again though: Seems like not the worst season for a freshman.

Notable Returners: With four starters returning from a #10 seed in the NCAA tournament, you can pretty easily throw the “run it back” label on the Wildcats for 2026-27. Three of the four are Villanova’s top three scorers from last season, led by a Big East-best 18.9 points per game from Jasmine Bascoe. This was her first year as the full fledged center of VU’s offense after sharing that job with Maddie Webber as a freshman. We can discuss whether or not it was a great idea to let Bascoe fire off 12 tw0-pointers a game when she was shooting just under 47%. Same goes for her 6.7 three-pointers per game when she only connected on a woeful 27.6% of them. At the very least, Bascoe made the most of the possessions when she didn’t shoot it, as she also led the Big East in assists at 4.8 per game. Per Her Hoop Stats, she ends up with a top 40 in the country assist rate, but the #15 usage rate is helping out in a big way there, too.

Bascoe’s top supporting cast was Brynn McCurry and Kennedy Henry, both of whom averaged over 26 minutes a game. McCurry was the bigger threat for the Wildcats, shooting over 36% to help her get to 10.7 points per game. That only asks the question as to why she was only shooting 1.7 threes per game while Henry and her 30.5% shooting percentage were off at 4.1 per contest. Ultimately, McCurry and Henry were relatively close on points, rebounds, and assists. Henry was a bigger threat on defense, beating out McCurry 2.3 steals per game to 1.0.

VU’s fourth returning starter is Kelsey Joens, but she had the smallest role of the five regulars in the starting lineup. She played just 19.8 minutes per game on average, and added 5.4 points and 2.9 rebounds per game. She was a 36% three-point shooter and still managed to cram 3.3 attempts per game into her playing time.

There are two reserves returning to help prop up Villanova’s depth as they try to go to back-to-back NCAA tournaments. Dani Ceseretti actually played more minutes than Kelsey Joens even though she came off the bench for all but two of her 32 appearances. She was a 42% three-point shooter, and you’d like to see the Wildcats get more out of her if she can keep that rate up. Brooke Bender had a perfectly fine freshman year, scoring 4.8 points and grabbing 2.6 rebounds per game while averaging 15.2 minutes in 32 appearances. No one was really asking her to carry the weight from game to game, but she did her job relative to whatever was going on around her.

Key Additions: I can’t nail down any specifics that tell you that Alexis Eberz (5’10” freshman guard) is a highly regarded recruit, so I can’t tell you to watch out for her right away this season. I can point out to you that her college decision came down to Villanova, the same school where both of her parents played basketball, or Marquette. If you can do math here, you can figure out that Villanova’s roster isn’t exactly the picture of depth for 2026-27, so it will be interesting to see if Eberz can contribute right away and thus what the Golden Eagles are missing by not having her this season. Am I saying this because MU still has three open roster spots and only snagged a second freshman recruit in the spring because of a coaching change? Maybe!

The only other new faces on the roster for Villanova are Anna Foley (6’3” senior forward) and Simone Pelish (6’0” sophomore guard). Foley was at Quinnipiac for the past three seasons, punching out three relatively similar seasons to average 11.3 points, 6.0 rebounds, 3.1 assists, plus a block and a steal in 98 career appearances. She did lose her starting job five games into this past season after holding down a spot there for all of her first two seasons on campus. I’m not sure how much that affected her decision to transfer or if it was head coach Tricia Fabbri retiring after this past season ended.

As for Pelish, she comes to the Main Line after one year at Miami. The now-former Hurricane appeared in 12 games as a freshman after redshirting in the 2024-25 season. Villanova is a bit closer to home than Poughkeepsie at the very least, so we’ll see if the change in scenery leads to a jump in playing time for her.

Coach: Denise Dillon, entering her seventh season at Villanova and 24th as a Division 1 head coach. She has a record of 139-59 with the Wildcats and 468-270 overall.

Outlook: I feel like 2025-26 Villanova is doing a great job explaining the horrendously narrow margins available to any Big East team not named UConn.

The Wildcats went into Selection Sunday with a record of 25-7 after rolling through the Big East at 16-2 against teams that aren’t from Storrs. You’d think that would have them relatively easily into the field of 68, but they were a #10 seed, and the last #10 seed was one of the First Four games.

Their non-conference schedule was not the problem. Villanova had two of the better wins in the country in non-con action, going out to West Virginia and James Madison and getting two Quadrant 1 road victories, with the WVU contest coming in as a top 20 opponent according to the NET. Now, those two wins are balanced out by their home losses to Princeton and Fairfield, but those are still Quadrant 2 losses and therefore not a massive problem for them. The worst non-conference game on their schedule was Lafayette which 1) is not a sub-300 NET opponent so not that bad especially because 2) it was their season opener, so I get the idea of scheduling there and 3) Lafayette is a hour’s drive from Villanova so it’s a local rivalry-ish game. The Wildcats got three 170 NET opponents out of their three Big 5 event games this season, so that’s outstanding non-conference scheduling even if it’s more tradition than actual effort.

Villanova’s problem when it came to NCAA tournament seeding was the fact that they had to play four sub-200 games in Big East play, home and road against both Xavier and DePaul. On top of that, they had to stack a five-pack of sub-130 league games — that’s the Providence and Butler series in there, plus a Big East tournament game against the Friars — onto the pile, and the home games against St. John’s, Georgetown, and Creighton (all between 90 and 105!) go as Quadrant 4 games for the Wildcats…. and for everyone else in the Big East at that.

The Wildcats were 16-0 against Q4 opponents, 12 of which were Big East games. That drags down Villanova’s computer numbers. It drags down the rest of the league’s numbers, so maybe Creighton/Georgetown/St. John’s aren’t Q4 at home if the Bluejays/Hoyas/Red Storm didn’t have the weight of the other eight games yanking them downwards as well. Where does Villanova get seeded if they have three more Quadrant 3 wins and three fewer Q4 wins?

And finally: The Big East has just enough teams that are trying to achieve something that they’re capable of catching each other on a nightly basis. That’s how you get Villanova losing 85-69 at Marquette and 71-58 at St. John’s. Those aren’t bad losses, not really! One’s in Quadrant 2, the other’s in Quadrant 3. You’d rather not take a Q3 loss, sure, but again: If 40% of your conference schedule wasn’t sub-130, you can withstand a road loss to a team that’s trying. If 20% of your conference schedule wasn’t sub-200, catching the business end of Marquette shooting 61% on three-pointers for 40 minutes doesn’t ding up your resume that much.

Mix all of that together, and that’s how Villanova ends up being either the 5th, 6th, or 7th team away from the cutline and one of the last three teams to avoid the First Four. They built a non-conference schedule that should have helped them, or more accurately, they had to build a non-conference schedule that would help them because an awful lot of Big East play was going to be more of an anchor than a springboard.

As for actual Villanova analysis? As long as Jasmine Bascoe does Jasmine Bascoe things, the Wildcats are probably going to be an NCAA tournament contender again. She does so much for them that it’s relatively easy to replace the supporting cast around her and end up with positive results. I’d be critical of Denise Dillon for building the whole plane out of one particular player’s contributions, but it worked with Maddy Siegrist, it mostly worked with Lucy Olsen, it even mostly worked when Bascoe was sharing responsibilities with Maddie Webber. It’s a system, and if everyone knows their role and plays their part in the system, then it works. The NCAA tournament field is expanding, so that’s going to make it easier on Nova if they do hit a pothole on their schedule. You can probably pencil the Wildcats in as second best in the Big East for next season and not think too hard about it.

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