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Villanova has rarely been among the first schools to finalize and release its men's basketball schedules, and this year will likely be no different. What we do know is that the team will travel to the Bahamas over Thanksgiving break for the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament, and they will definitely play at Syracuse on December 28th — those games have been announced officially, either by the school or by the tournament's media relations group.
Villanova's non-conference schedule: Battle For Atlantis, at Syracuse, at Temple, at St. Joe's, La Salle, Towson, Delaware, Penn.....
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) May 11, 2013
According to Jon Rothstein of CBS, the 'Cats are also slated to play Towson and Delaware in addition to the usual four Big 5 games. As it currently stands, that allows us to begin the process of piecing together the 2013-14 Wildcats' schedule, even if we don't have dates for the games in question.
Conference Games
With 10 teams the new Big East conference is expected to play a double-round robin with each team coming to Philadelphia and Villanova visiting each of its nine conference opponents. While we don't have exact dates on any of those games (and likely won't for a while — potentially not until the Fall), we can go ahead and lock down 18 games for the Wildcats.
They will play each of the following schools twice, home and away, starting in January: Georgetown, Marquette, St. John's, Xavier, Butler, Creighton, Seton Hall, Providence and DePaul.
The schools comprising Villanova's conference slate averaged an RPI ranking of 65.4 last season. By comparison, the 2012-13 "old" Big East conference that the 'Cats played in most recently averaged an RPI ranking of 68.1 (but, to be fair, Creighton
Non-Conference Games
With 19 games accounted for, the Wildcats are left with 12 non-conference spots to fill on the schedule. Three of those games will be played in the Bahamas against some combination of Kansas, Tennessee, USC, UTEP, Xavier, Wake Forest and Iowa (average RPI rank last season of 83.8), depending on how the bracket is constructed and who advances to which games. All of those games will be played at a neutral site (obviously). That leaves nine non-conference slots.
Here are the ones we know of already:
- AT Temple
- AT St. Joseph's
- La Salle
- Towson
- Penn
- Delaware
- AT Syracuse (December 28)