HOUSTON — In a 95-51 demolition of Oklahoma on Saturday night, Villanova not only punched its ticket to the national title game but also set a standard for Final Four blowouts. Through 78 Final Fours — dating to the first, in 1939, which also featured the Wildcats and the Sooners — 44 points is the largest margin of victory.
That includes games involving the U.C.L.A. teams that were part of seven straight national championships; Bob Knight’s great Indiana teams; the high-scoring 1991 Nevada-Las Vegas team; the Duke team that beat that U.N.L.V. team. Whichever great college team is sepia-sketched in your memory as historically dominant, know that it did not do what Villanova did Saturday.
Consider Bill Russell. Bill Bradley. Bill Walton. Many great college basketball players not named Bill: Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Christian Laettner, Anthony Davis. None have participated in so spectacular a rout.
“They made shots,” Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield said after his final college game. “We were trying to find a way to make shots. They just played terrific tonight.”
The second-seeded Wildcats (34-5) indeed made shots: 11 of 18 3-point attempts, a 61.1 percent accuracy rate, and 35 of 49 over all from the field, or 71.4 percent. Villanova’s field-goal percentage was the second highest in Final Four history, surpassed only by that of the 1985 Villanova team, a No. 8 seed that upset Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the title game.
Hield entered Saturday’s game as the second-leading scorer and most effective 3-point shooter in Division I. In his senior year, he built on catch-and-shoot wing play that had led to his being named the Big 12 player of the year as a junior. Hield added the ability to create shots off the dribble, whether by driving to the hoop or by taking step-back 3-point jumpers that have drawn comparisons to Stephen Curry’s game.
But nearly as impressive as Villanova’s offensive attack was its defensive performance. The Wildcats held Hield to 9 points — his second-lowest total of the season — on 4-for-12 shooting, with just one 3-pointer.
Villanova’s frantic defense — sometimes pressing, sometimes man-to-man, sometimes zone, always aggressive — flustered the Sooners.
Hield seemed to receive more open looks in the second half, but he struggled to convert them, missing all three of his 3-point attempts.
Oklahoma (29-8) was not exactly a surprise entrant in the Final Four. It was a No. 2 seed that had already knocked off No. 3-seeded Texas A&M and No. 1-seeded Oregon. The Sooners had even beaten Villanova by 28 points in December. On Saturday, with Villanova creating 17 turnovers and holding Oklahoma 29 points under its average of 80 per game, that earlier game felt as if from the Mesozoic Era.
Villanova players had spent several days telling anyone who would listen that no matter how well known the team’s four-guard, perimeter-oriented offensive sets were, and no matter how much flashier 3-pointers and fast breaks might be, defense was what made the Wildcats tick.
“We don’t care too much about offense,” Mikal Bridges, a redshirt freshman, said recently, adding: “Us stepping up on defense is just the biggest thing. I’d rather have that than just making shots.”
After Saturday’s game, the junior Josh Hart said: “Obviously we love when we can hit shots. But this program is really built on just dialing in defensively, being tough.”
Villanova’s home court, the 6,500-seat Pavilion, is dwarfed by NRG Stadium, which holds more than 70,000, but the Wildcats appeared unfazed, taking what Coach Jay Wright described on Friday as a business-first approach.
It showed in the first half, as Villanova shot 18 for 27 from the field and had three players with at least 8 points.
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Ryan Arcidiacono, playing in his program-record 143rd game, finished with 15 points and 3 assists. The junior Kris Jenkins scored 18 points.
Hart, who is probably Villanova’s most talented player — most likely the one, along with the freshman guard Jalen Brunson, with the best chance at a successful N.B.A. career — was brilliant on offense. Wright has spoken of Villanova’s improved decision-making, and he may as well play on a loop the possession in which Hart got the ball behind the 3-point line, passed up a contested shot to dribble in and made a midrange jumper. He finished with 23 points, 8 rebounds and 4 assists.
Bridges, a 6-foot-7 player, benefited from his team’s San Antonio Spurs-style ball movement. On one first-half possession, the ball ricocheted from Arcidiacono to Daniel Ochefu in the high post and back out to the wing, where Bridges sank a 3-pointer. He scored 11 points on only four field-goal attempts.
Villanova built a 14-point lead in the first half with a 21-4 run. Hield scored just 7 points and made only 1 of 5 3-point attempts, with three turnovers. He went more than 15 minutes without a basket.
“At halftime I felt good, like we were focused in and we were playing good basketball,” Wright said. “I didn’t think it was ours at that point, but I felt good that what we decided to do was working.”
Oklahoma came out in the second half with a press and seemed to make some headway. Sooners fans were catalyzed less than four minutes in when guard Jordan Woodard missed a free throw, rebounded the ball and converted a putback in one fluid motion, cutting Villanova’s lead to 9 and prompting Wright to call a timeout.
But Villanova responded. Hart took the ball at the other end, rebounded his own miss and laid it in, drawing a foul.
It only grew worse from there for the Sooners, who, during one stretch in the second half, made 1 of 13 shots from the field. With more than seven minutes left, Villanova led by 36. The Sooners senior Ryan Spangler, a native Oklahoman, rubbed his bleary eyes with a towel, as if in disbelief.
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