Villanova Basketball to host Penn in Jake Nevin Fieldhouse

Some very cool news out of the Athletics Department today as the Villanova Wildcats will host the Penn Quakers at Jake Nevin Fieldhouse in late November.

It was always a stretch that every home game would be scheduled at the Wells Fargo Center, but we assumed this matchup may end up at the Palestra given the Big 5’s history.

I have mixed thoughts on this, but I think it’s mostly a very cool idea that hasn’t been fully thought through.

Villanova is taking advantage of a one-off season and doing something special that they wouldn’t normally do. That should be commended. St. John’s plays several games at Carnesecca Arena each year and Georgetown has played games at McDonough reccently as well. They’re intimate environments and they’ve been larely well-received.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine the capacity of Nevin being much more than 1500 which means not all students can attend. And the school is saying that “details on a limited supply of tickets for this game will be made available in the coming weeks on villanova.com.”

That means this won’t be a student-only event, which I think was the only way to do a game in this small of a facility on campus.

Also (welcome to the whine wine and cheese crowd, Lane), I just bought season tickets under the guise that I would have access to all home games except the quasi-neutral games against Lafayette and Hofstra. And now I don’t have access to another game. Hopefully there’s an appropriate price reduction, or I can understand some fans being a little ticked off.