Xfinity Mobile Arena played host to a trio of basketball games on Saturday afternoon as the Toyota-sponsored Big 5 Classic arrived on South Broad Street for 120 minutes (and several “commercial-free” hours) of hardwood action at the home of the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers.
“This is a great, great day for Philadelphia basketball,” Drexel head coach Zach Spiker said to open his postgame press conference. “It continues to be a great day to celebrate all these teams, and we hope we can find a way to keep it going… I think it’s a really, really unique thing. I just think it’s great.”
The annual college basketball tournament brings together six schools—Drexel, La Salle, Penn, St. Joes, Temple, and Villanova—for a unique tournament not found elsewhere on the college hoops scene.
The La Salle Explorers survived the Drexel Dragons, 69-64, in the first game of the Saturday triple-header. La Salle senior Josiah Harris recorded a double-double with 21 points and 13 rebounds in the win, while Shane Blackney and Garfield Turner were tied at 11 points to lead Drexel in scoring. The Explorers held a 19-point lead at halftime, and nearly let the game slip away in the second half.
“We knew they (Drexel) were going to make a run (in the second half),” La Salle head coach Darris Nichols said postgame. “You know, they started changing defenses a little bit. That kind of got us to slow down. But we settled in, started making better decisions, and got the ball moving again. I didn’t feel we got too high or too low during the game, and that’s been a problem over the last few games.”
La Salle improves to 4-6 on the campaign, while Drexel slips to the same 4-6 mark in 2025.
Temple held a two-point lead with seven seconds remaining in the contest before Chris “Deuce” Jones II connected on a long-range, three-point shot to win the game, 70-69, for St. Joseph’s. The Hawks outscored the Owls, 44-37, to complete the comeback in the second half on Jones’ buzzer-beating bucket.
“Tough one,” Temple head coach Adam Fisher said after the game. “We challenged our team in the second half, and I thought they responded, and now we’ve got to respond again. We can’t get this one back. It hurts. It stinks. It sucks. This is what Big 5 basketball is.”
Jones finished with 17 points on 6-of-14 shooting, but the sophomore guard from Trenton, New Jersey, knocked down his shot when it mattered the most for the Hawks. Temple’s Derrian Ford led the Owls with 27 points in the loss. St. Joes improves to 4-3 on the season, while Temple falls to 4-4.
The Penn Quakers kept things close with the Villanova Wildcats through the first 20 minutes of action, but still found themselves with a sizeable, 15-point deficit as the clock rolled to zero on the oversized scoreboard. In the second half, Villanova continued to knock down long-range shots and kept the Quakers from mounting a proper comeback. The Wildcats maintained a 20-point lead throughout much of the second half, while the Quakers were unable to generate the stops needed to bring them back into the game.
Penn’s leading scorer, Ethan Roberts, went down with a scary-looking injury following a collision early in the second half. Roberts was struck in the face by a screen and hit the floor hard. While he was able to leave the court under his own power, the senior was in distress heading to the locker room.
“He is on his way to the hospital,” Quaker's head coach Fran McCaffery told the media postgame. “He was visibly not in a good place. So, our thoughts and prayers are with him. His mom and dad are here, so we’ll go over to the hospital and see how he is doing.”
There were no updates on Roberts’ injury at press time.
Bryce Lindsey led the Wildcats with 18 points. Duke Brennan was selected as the winner of the “VGH (Very Good Hoops) Award”, the MVP for the Big 5 Classic. The award is handed out in honor of Jack Scheuer, a mainstay in the Philly college basketball scene who passed away in October 2020 after a lengthy battle with cancer.
With the win, Villanova improves to 6-1 on the 2025 season, while Penn drops to 5-4.
There is more college basketball action coming to Philadelphia in Spring 2026, when the NCAA Men’s College Basketball First Round and Second Round take place at Xfinity Mobile Arena on March 20 and 22, 2026. While the teams in action on the floor won’t be known until after the calendar flips to the new year, the general on-sale date for those NCAA Tournament tickets is this Friday, Dec. 10, at 7 a.m. ET via Ticketmaster.com. For more on the Philadelphia basketball scene, keep it locked to Metro Philadelphia.
