PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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By Zack Cziryak
Matt Loughlin feels the way a lot of Seton Hall alumni and fans do about the Shaheen Holloway era: new blood may be a good thing.
The radio voice of the New Jersey Devils and creator and host of the Seton Hall basketball-focused podcast Pirates Talk, Loughlin is as keen on the new head coach as any Pirate fan and his promise in elevating the program beyond the NCAA tournament regular status that his predecessor and former boss Kevin Willard had reached.
"I think his personality is such, he's much more outgoing, Kevin was more reserved. When you got to know Kevin a little bit, he opened up, but that was difficult for some people to get to that level with him,” Loughlin said. “I think Sha's got that outgoing personality. He's not that far removed from being a standout player.”
While Holloway became a household name for college basketball fans across the nation on the back of his run guiding the 15 seed Saint Peter’s Peacocks to the Elite Eight earlier this year, Loughlin points to the incremental success that program made in his four-year tenure as the real testament to his ability to build a sustainable winner.
"I think his energy is infectious and I think he learned how to coach ... Just look at the record, he had constant improvement there,” he said, referencing Holloway’s 22-12 record and MAAC Tournament title, to go along with the Elite 8 appearance, in year 4 after taking over a 14-18 team from his predecessor John Dunne and finishing his first season at 10-22.
A Seton Hall graduate who led the 1999-2000 squad to the Sweet 16, its last appearance that deep in the NCAA Tournament, Holloway understands and is built to run a program with a blue collar-mentality like the Pirates.
"Bill Raftery told me many years ago, it was actually just shortly after Kevin took over, and he said, 'Kevin's going to be good for the program because he understands what Seton Hall is.' I mean, it's a small campus, located in South Orange, doesn't have all the bells and whistles that some of its Big East competitors have, etc., etc., but he gets it, it's a blue-collar school. And Sha's blue collar and he gets it, too. So that handoff is going to go seamlessly,” he noted.
Loughlin also believes Holloway’s area connections are one of the chief reasons he feels confident the new head coach in South Orange will excel.
“He's basically a son of Jersey - I know there's a New York City element to his life - but we basically view him as ours. That's going to help enormously."
In a college basketball landscape that has been upended in recent years with essentially an unrestricted transfer portal and the onset of players to earn income off their Name, Image and Likeness, Loughlin believes Holloway represents the type of personality to build Seton Hall beyond what it has accomplished in recent years.
"I think he's got all the elements. I think he can relate a little bit more to the younger kids - not that there's a big difference there between he and Kevin - but it just strikes me that he's got that part of the game down. And I think he's got, as I said this infectious personality, I think he draws people toward him,” Loughlin said. “And as the game changes ... I think he's in a good position to be able to be a beacon when some kids want to come home or play at a higher stage.”
Despite limping through the Big East tournament and being eliminated unceremoniously from the NCAA Tournament, Kevin Willard capped his run at Seton Hall with a 5th (official) tourney berth and another 20-win season, far from the norm prior to his arrival in 2010. Willard’s tenure also includes the 2016 Big East Tournament title and a co-regular season championship, as well as various individual accolades for his players, including Big East Players of the Year Myles Powell in 2020 and Sandro Mamukelashvili in 2021.
Willard’s resume at Seton Hall, while lacking anything approaching Holloway’s NCAA Tournament success in just a single opportunity, is a testament to the rebuilding job he accomplished after taking over a program mired in strife from the prior regime. It’s a job Loughlin feels many Seton Hall fans are forgetting amid the more recent successes.
"I think it's like a 'what have you done for me lately' kind of thing,” he said. “People don't remember where Seton Hall was and what the reputation was and the repair work and building that Kevin had to do. And then suddenly as he starts to get them into the tournament on a regular basis, or certainly the expectations that they could be a tournament team then since they didn't advance, it was kind of like, 'okay, what's going on?'”
While he’s appreciative of the work Willard did for Seton Hall, he ultimately believes it was a good break for all parties.
