The following content is purely satirical.
At the men’s basketball game between Purdue and Northern Kentucky in West Lafayette, Indiana on Friday, Nov. 8, Purdue’s student section, “The Paint Crew,” chanted “Fire Walters” as the Boilermakers dribbled out a 72-50 victory.
Purdue’s Athletic Department reprimanded the Paint Crew for the chant, which targeted Purdue football head coach Ryan Walters. At the time, Walters’ team had dropped seven games in a row, with the Boilermakers’ only win of the 2024 season coming against FCS Indiana State.
The second-year head coach, who has a record of 5-16 in his time at Purdue, was not at the game, as the Boilermakers played at noon at Ohio State the next day. But he did wake up in a cold sweat at the Columbus Airport Marriott Friday night, as he sensed that somewhere, a crowd of 20-year-olds thought that he was bad at his job.
The chants affected the second-year coach so much that the next day he could only pace the sidelines staring at the ground with his shoulders slumped, Charlie Brown-style.
If only that group of teens and barely-not-teens had been nicer to Walters at the end of that basketball game. Then, the upstart Boilermakers would have walked into Ohio Stadium and beat the Buckeyes at home for the first time since 1988.
Unfortunately, because those college kids left Walters bereft of any moxie to coach his football team, they lost, 45-0. An eighth-straight loss for the Boilermakers.
Well then, it’s good news that Villanova students took the moral high ground and rejected a call from Instagram user @BarstoolNova to chant “Fire Neptune” during the first three minutes of Friday’s men’s basketball game between the Wildcats and NJIT.
In the aftermath of the team’s 90-80 loss to mid-tier Ivy League team Columbia on Wednesday, @BarstoolNova made a post Friday afternoon at around 1 p.m. that encouraged the student section and the crowd attending that evening’s game to sustain a chant of “Fire Neptune” “as loud and as passionately as possible” for the first three minutes of the game. The account pulled the post within roughly 15 minutes of it being published to its nearly 30-thousand followers, potentially as a response to negative feedback in the comment section. When the game tipped off, no collective chant was heard from the student section or crowd at-large.
It would have been the first time that anyone’s ever been mean to third-year head coach Kyle Neptune during his tenure at Villanova. It very well could have demoralized Neptune and the players to the point where they could have lost to the Highlanders. Instead, propelled by the absence of chants they were definitely expecting and anxiously waiting on, the ‘Cats claimed an unexpected, 91-54 victory over basketball power the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
It’s a bright moment that the Villanova student body that was in attendance for the game was able to come together and hold strong against chanting anything that would have subliminally affected the match-up. Villanova is known for its brutal, unkind community that will go after anyone. Around campus, the term “Villanova mean” has been coined to describe the aggressive nature of the student body. The ability to hold its collective tongue is a wonderful endorsement of the human spirit and massive shift in attitude for the ‘Nova Nation, which routinely tells opposing players that they “suck.”
Taking the high road over the admin of @BarstoolNova is a tough task, too, and the ‘Nova Nation accomplished it. The virtuous administration of the anonymous account works in the shadows to uphold the Barstool brand on a grassroots level. It’s tough work to “make” memes and change Canva templates to post three-ish times a week under a satellite account of Barstool, a company whose owner is a union-busting Masshole with a bevy of sexual assault allegations spilling out from under the rug. It is frankly shocking that a social media admin who would align themselves with such a brand would make a rash post calling for fans to chant “Fire Neptune.” There’s simply no precedent for short-sighted, later-retracted, comments from any of the Barstool Industries™ accounts.
The timing of the @BarstoolNova post was actually fortuitous for Villanova men’s basketball. It provided a distraction from the actual news of the day, that four-star freshman forward Matthew Hodge may be forced into an academic redshirt by the NCAA after he had issues with the initial eligibility process stemming from his transition from Belgian high school to American high school. Hopefully, @BarstoolNova will issue a sophisticated, well-researched post that lets ‘Nova Nation know how to react after the NCAA’s Initial-Eligibility Waiver Committee’s gavel drops on Wednesday.
It’s great that Villanova students were able to maintain a professional demeanor throughout the entirety of Friday’s game. The last place the ‘Nova Nation wants to return to is the jeering of a January home loss to Marquette that capped a five-game Big East skid that took the Wildcats from a seven-seed NCAA tournament projection to “on the bubble” banishment from the field. Fans reacted with puerile booing to the loss, much to the frustration of the team.
“You have the fans booing our coach who we’re going out there, throwing it all on the line for,” former guard TJ Bamba said after the team’s sixth-straight loss to Marquette, dating back to 2021. “And we don’t respect that. So if you’re like a real fan base, you’re really into the program, I feel like you should support your players [and] your coaches no matter what, no matter what they’re going through. That’s the way I feel. That’s the way we all feel. Because we love each other.”
Bamba loved his team so much that he gave his only remaining year of eligibility to Oregon, scrambling back to the Pacific Northwest after the Wildcats made a second NIT first-round exit in as many appearances. Supporting your team is a nice idea, but it has nothing on Phil Knight’s Nike money flooding into the Ducks’ NIL collective.
Even after the ‘Cats struggled with an inferior opponent, it is encouraging that those in the Finneran Pavilion on Friday night were able to represent Villanova the Wright way. Just remember, Neptune and the team definitely care about what you think. If you even so much as consider that the ‘Cats may be trending in the wrong direction, the team can read your mind and will be really, really sad. The ‘Cats already lost to St. Joe’s this week. If you keep up the negativity they’ll lose to Virginia too.
