The 2026-27 college basketball season opener will enjoy a unique backdrop, as Notre Dame and Villanova will send their teams to Rome to tip off on Nov. 1.
The men’s teams will play that Sunday morning U.S. time, followed by a game between their women’s teams. Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pope and a Villanova graduate — was invited to attend, and the players were scheduled to have an audience with him before the games, though those plans are less certain following news that Leo required surgery to remove a cancerous nodule from his lung.
The trip will also be an early homecoming for Luigi Suigo, the 7-foot-3 Italian center who joined Villanova after playing for clubs in Milan and Belgrade, Serbia.
Still 19, Suigo is adjusting to the American game and recently committed two fouls in the first 76 seconds of an exhibition game against George Mason.
“He’s got to learn,” Wildcats coach Kevin Willard said. “… I think everyone sees a 7-foot-3 kid and automatically thinks he’s a grown man. A 19-year-old from Italy who has never played high-major basketball, he has to figure it out a little bit, and we have to be patient with him and you have to go through some growing pains a little bit.”
Villanova expects to be firmly in the Big East title chase. Voted third in the preseason coaches’ poll behind only UConn and St. John’s, the Wildcats return Tyler Perkins, a preseason all-conference first-teamer who led them last season with 13.7 points per game. They added transfer forwards Kwame Evans Jr. (Oregon) and Devin Royal (Ohio State).
Perkins, Royal and Suigo were the only players in the starting lineups for each of Villanova’s first two exhibitions. Evans is day-to-day with a left leg injury.
“I didn’t have to watch film of (Royal or Evans) because I had seen so much of (them) live,” Willard said. “I respected them from having gone up against them. … I’m still trying to figure out everybody.”
Notre Dame was selected 16th in the 18-team Atlantic Coast Conference’s preseason media poll, and coach Micah Shrewsberry may be on the hot seat after going sub-.500 and missing the NCAA Tournament each of his first three seasons.
He is starting over without longtime leading scorer Markus Burton, Jalen Haralson and other familiar faces. His only returning regular starter is his son, Braeden Shrewsberry (11.9 ppg, 40.2% from 3-point range last season). Brady Koehler (5.6 ppg) also is back after serving as a starter for the second half of last season.
Micah Shrewsberry indicated the Fighting Irish’s projected starting five are his son, Kohler, Braeden Smith (Gonzaga transfer), Ethan Roberts (Penn) and Logan Duncomb (Winthrop). Duncomb was the Big South Player of the Year, and four-star guard Jonathan Sanderson headlines the freshman class.
“I think we’re a question mark for everybody right now, right, even for ourselves,” the coach said. “We wanna go and play and challenge ourselves against other people to see where we’re at.”