Jay Wright is a Churchville, Pa., native, a Bucknell graduate and the longtime men's basketball coach at Villanova, a school in the Philadelphia suburbs with as much pride in its lineage of Philly guards as the city has in its cheese steaks.
And yet, he conceded Wednesday, to cross the Mason-Dixon line is to enter "probably the hotbed of basketball right now in our country."
"This whole Baltimore-Washington D.C. area is probably now — and I'll get killed by my New York boys — the most fertile ground in the country right now," Wright told reporters before the Cal Ripken Sr.