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Rosario's shot failed to touch the rim and Cheek and his Villanova teammates raced the other way on offense.

"I got a piece of it because me and Mike played in high school together and I know how Mike plays already," said Cheek, a 6-foot-5 freshman who scored a career-high 17 points to lift the No. 4 Wildcats to their eighth straight victory, 94-68, over Rosario and Rutgers.

While Villanova (17-1, 6-0) is now the lone unbeaten team in the Big East, Rutgers (9-9, 0-6) remained winless in the conference and lost its seventh straight.

On a night when Villanova senior star Scottie Reynolds managed just 9 points, the team's three former Jersey prep stars -- Cheek, Corey Stokes (St. Benedict's) and Corey Fisher (St. Patrick) -- combined for 48 points.

It was a far cry from two years ago, when Fisher and Stokes struggled in their homecoming as freshmen when Rutgers beat then-No. 18 Villanova, 80-68, at the RAC.

St. Patrick coach Kevin Boyle, whose team is ranked No. 4 in the nation, watched Wednesday from behind the Rutgers bench as Fisher, his former star point guard, posted 15 points, 6 rebounds and 4 assists.

Stokes, who played for Dan Hurley at St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, seemed to emerge from his recent funk by adding 16 points, hitting 4-for-7 from behind the arc.

"This is the first time ever that St. Benedict's, St. Pat's and St. Anthony [are] on the same team so I think we just came here and played 40 minutes of Villanova basketball," Cheek said. "We didn't play for the fans. We just played for our teammates and the coaching staff."

It was a night of divergent emotions for Cheek and Rosario, the two former St. Anthony teammates who two years ago led Bob Hurley's fabled program to an undefeated season and a mythical national championship. That season is chronicled in the outstanding documentary, "The Street Stops Here," which will air March 31 on PBS.

Rosario, who managed just 3 points on 1-for-8 shooting and sat through a portion of the second half as Rutgers made a run, declined to speak with the media after the game.

Through six Big East games, Rutgers' go-to player is shooting 20-for-87 (23 percent).

"I think Mike, his time's gonna come, probably next game or any other game," Cheek said. "Mike's a great competitor [and] Rutgers, they're a great team."

Cheek and Villanova are everything Rosario and Rutgers are not at this point.

With Jay Wright, the Wildcats have a stable coaching situation while Rutgers head coach Fred Hill is mired in uncertainty surrounding his future.

The names of everyone from Bob Knight to Fran McCaffery to Lawrence Frank have been tossed out as possible replacements should the school opt to buy out Hill, whose contract runs through the 2012-13 season.

The Villanova roster, in the meantime, features players from New Jersey's three premier prep programs, while Rutgers just saw a St. Benedict's player, Gregory Echenique, transfer midseason to Creighton after suffering a serious eye injury.

"We would love to have them and we recruited them," Hill said of Fisher, Stokes and Cheek. "I wish I didn't do such a good job eight years ago, to be quite honest with you."

Hill was referring to his time as an assistant at Villanova, where he helped recruit Jason Fraser, Allan Ray, Randy Foye and Curtis Sumpter to the Wildcats, laying the foundation for their current success.

"One of the things that Villanova's got going for them is that they've gotten the program rolling. When you have experienced that type of success, that filters through the new guys and the old guys teach the new guys," Hill said.

"And now you keep recruiting great player after great player after great player. When you have guys that had success, when Mike Nardi goes from St. Pat's to Villanova and has great success, it's easy for Corey Fisher to follow. It's easy for Corey Stokes to follow. It's easy for Dom Cheek now to go down to Villanova."

He added: "As talented as they are, what makes them so good is the culture and the attitude that they have, the winning attitude. That's not just good players. That's a championship caliber program."

Even with the loss of Dante Cunningham's leadership from last year's team that made the Final Four, the Villanova players expect and believe their team can build on that success this year.

The Rutgers players, meanwhile, are mainly young and inexperienced, unaccustomed to losing so much.

"I feel like during the game, we gave up," said Rutgers freshman Dane Miller, who scored a game-high 26 points and led Rutgers' second-half run with Rosario slumped on the bench. "And we can't get better, we can't improve, if we give up on games.

"The high school I went to, no matter what the score is you gotta play till the game's over and I felt like we just gave up at the end."

Nine years ago, Wright was offered the head coaching job at Rutgers. He was the first choice of then-AD Bob Mulcahy to replace the fired Kevin Bannon.

Wright was on the brink of accepting the position when the Villanova job came open after Steve Lappas left the school. Instead of coming to Rutgers, Wright took his dream job.

Now he monitors what goes on at Rutgers and can only imagine what would have happened had Corey Chandler not been dismissed from school last summer and Echenique not transferred.

"If you had Chandler and Echenique on this team, you would have had mature guys at this point," Wright said. "And you add Dane Miller and Jonathan Mitchell with those guys and Rosario, you got a really good team."

Instead, Wright conceded that Hill is "kind of starting over here."

"He's got a good core here," Wright added. "I think this is going to be a good team. And I think it's going to happen during this season. But I didn't want it to happen against us tonight."

Cheek said he planned to call Rosario after the game.

Two former teammates, once connected by championships, now talking about how their teams are headed in very different directions.