NEW YORK — At the moment that erased any doubt that his season and his career as Villanova’s head coach would soon be over, Kyle Neptune was hunched over with his hands on his knees near midcourt at Madison Square Garden, assuming a stance similar to someone exhausted from a race he couldn’t even finish.

Connecticut’s Samson Johnson was twirling in an acrobatic and-one layup over Jhamir Brickus, the Huskies’ lead stretching to 11 points with less than three minutes left in regulation late Thursday night, and Neptune couldn’t have been better positioned for the bad news ahead of him. Not just a 73-56 loss, not just a third straight season that ended short of the Big East Tournament semifinals and without an NCAA Tournament berth, but the bigger, broader ramifications.

There was Villanova, heading home early again. Neptune was bent at the waist and powerless to stop another Wildcats collapse. There he was in a black shirt, a black suit, and black sneakers. He had dressed appropriately for his own coaching funeral.

» READ MORE: Villanova fires its men’s basketball coach Kyle Neptune

A lack of identity

You didn’t have to be a plugged-in newsbreaker to know that Saturday’s announcement that Villanova was firing Neptune was inevitable. Too many trends and tides were rolling in the same direction. Too many whispers were leaking from within the university community, from inside the program itself, to think Neptune’s tenure would last any longer.

For now, assistant Mike Nardi will serve as interim head coach for the remainder of this season if Villanova accepts an invitation for postseason play, most notably the College Basketball Crown tournament later this month.

Villanova recently hired a new athletic director, Eric Roedl, and athletic directors like to have a say in who gets hired to be in charge of a department’s flagship program.

Whatever hope Neptune had of hanging on evaporated amid a series of squandered leads and excruciating, avoidable losses, and Thursday night’s was only the latest and last: a five-point lead at halftime, a tie game with eight minutes to go, a 17-point final score following a late-game fade.

The Wildcats had the talent to win 25 games this season, and they should have won 25 games this season. They went 19-14 instead, and no coach survives when his team falls so short of expectations.

When asked about Neptune’s status immediately after Thursday’s game, Roedl said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” But in late November, on the day Villanova introduced him, he had laid out the criteria he would use to evaluate Neptune’s performance.

“There are a number of things,” Roedl said then, “that go into evaluating programs and coaches: the academic performance of the student-athletes, the culture of the program, the trajectory in recruiting, obviously on-the-court results, community engagement. Are people engaged? Are people excited? Are we selling tickets? Are we raising money? Those are all things that go into evaluating a program.”

By those benchmarks, Villanova needs to improve and improve fast. Indifference hovers like a nimbus cloud over the program, and Neptune contributed to that atmosphere not merely through his 54-47 record and his inability to guide the Wildcats to the NCAAs but through how he carried himself publicly and privately.

His one year’s worth of head coaching experience, a .500 season at Fordham, and his eight years under Jay Wright provided no clues about how he’d fare once he took over at Villanova, and he and his teams were mostly a mystery. He seemed deathly afraid of saying anything interesting or revealing, let alone colorful or controversial, and that blandness bled onto the court.

Was the task of melding the holdovers who remembered the Wright way — Eric Dixon and Jordan Longino — with the newcomers who had less invested in the program’s traditions too much for him? The laughing, smiling, and smartphone-checking in the Villanova locker room early Friday morning, immediately after the UConn loss, suggested it might have been.

What were his coaching philosophies? The Wildcats were disjointed so often that he seemed not to have any — his decisions reactive, not proactive, and frequently a tick too late.

Was there anything about his style or system that was his own, or was everything he did just derivative of some vague concept called Villanova basketball?

Neptune was in so many ways a blank slate, and no college basketball program with aspirations of competing for championships in a major conference can have a coach who doesn’t have a strong identity — or, in Neptune’s case, barely had one at all.

At no time did he project the image of a man who actually enjoyed his job. From the moment he was hired until he was fired, he coached the Wildcats as if, given a choice, he wouldn’t, as if he were doing so out of a sense of obligation — as if succeeding Wright were a penance of some kind.

He and the program certainly suffered. Maybe it was.

Breaking from the past

What Villanova should not do, cannot do, is hire another coach with direct ties to Wright, to fall back on someone who apprenticed under or learned from him. It will be a tempting move because it’s always tempting to assume that anyone who has come in contact with a great coach has been sprinkled with some of the magic dust that made that icon’s career so special.

At his best, though, Wright was college basketball’s answer to Bill Belichick. He was the nerve center of the entire program. He did everything, and that immersion made being on his staff a less-than-ideal training ground for becoming a head coach.

Neptune, Billy Lange, Ashley Howard, Patrick Chambers, Joe Jones, Baker Dunleavy — the spotty results of Wright’s former assistants parallel those of Charlie Weis, Romeo Crenell, Matt Patricia, and other Belichick disciples who struggled once an NFL owner or NCAA athletic director handed them a measure of control they’d never had before.

There’s another reason, too, for Villanova to refrain from inspecting the branches of Wright’s coaching tree for the program’s next leader: Hiring a familiar name will be in line with the university’s culture of staid, incremental change, its hesitancy to deviate from the priorities of its past.

Villanova has long been conservative in its thinking and actions. Even the slightest spark of flashiness or juice in a player’s game would be snuffed out like a flicker of fire. A 360-dunk in practice? Don’t you dare post that highlight on social media. That’s not what this program is about. That’s not Villanova basketball.

But that approach now risks turning the program from solid and stable to stodgy and old-fashioned, and this new and still-volatile era of college basketball demands boldness and beyond-the-baselines thinking from Villanova and schools like it.

The Wildcats have had four head coaches over the last 52 years, and those four form a smooth line of succession: Rollie Massimino gave way to Steve Lappas, who had been one of Massimino’s assistants. Lappas gave way to Wright, who worked under Massimino and with Lappas. Wright gave way to Neptune, who worked under Wright. That history is revealing for what Villanova — not its alumni and boosters and students and fans, but its decision-makers — wants from its men’s basketball program.

Wright’s four Final Fours and two national championships were blasts of brilliant sunshine for a university leadership that would be content with a slightly dimmer landscape. If the Wildcats won 20-25 games, threatened to break the NCAA Tournament bubble every year, and did little else that called attention to the program, president Rev. Peter Donohue and the rest of Villanova’s administration would likely be satisfied.

The problem is that in the world of name, image, and likeness of athletes having unfettered freedom, even that standard is harder to meet for a private Catholic university competing in the Big East.

Kyle Neptune couldn’t meet it. Jay Wright saw what was coming and declined to try.

Still, the course of action for the university, in a college athletics landscape that will soon stop shifting so much, is pretty clear: Pay for the players, and find the right coach to teach and inspire them. This is the lowest Villanova basketball has been in at least a generation, and it will take a dynamic leader to get the program and everyone in it standing up straight and tall again.