The Muskies have shown their strength over the last 15 games.
There might be teams with better resumes near the bubble, but there isn’t a better team there than Xavier. Sure, the Muskies are 1-9 in Q1 games this year, but there are plenty of reasons to ignore that mark. X was always going to come out of the gate slow; their minutes continuity of 25.9% is 235th in the nation per KenPom. If replacing three quarters of the roster wasn’t bad enough, they were dealt another blow when Lassina Traore went down for the year to a knee injury before a ball was ever tipped.
Can you expect a team coming out of the gates with that kind of adversity to know who slots in where on the crunch time totem pole right out of the gate? Of course not.
Things went from bad to worse for the Muskies in the Crosstown Shootout, where Zach Freemantle picked up the injury that would cause him to miss three games and hamper him for at least a couple more. Xavier went 1-4 in that stretch and arguably should have been 3-2. A ticky-tack foul call saved UConn from the game-winning three Dante Maddox Jr had dialed up, and Ryan Conwell was on his way to at least tie the game against Marquette when he got slide tackled at mis-court. That kind of play would draw a yellow card and a free kick in soccer; all it got was a play-on from the officials in front of a perplexed Cintas crowd.
When Freemantle came back to full strength though, it was game on. Xavier is 12-3 in that run that stretches back to February 8th. Their only losses are in OT at St. John’s, a loss at Creighton that I’m going to admit was just a butt kicking, and the game at Nova where they collapsed due to influenza A.
Since that loss, with their backs well and truly to the wall, Xavier has reeled off 7 straight. In the 12-3 stretch they’ve played like a top 25 team and compiled 3.1 WAB, 17th in the nation. I’m going undefeated in their last 7, they’ve been 15th on the Torvik rankings and 12th with +2.0 WAB.
They’ve done it by locking in on defense and getting timely buckets. They’ve done it by finding the hot hand, sometimes Dante Maddox Jr, sometimes Ryan Conwell, and increasingly Zach Freemantle. They’ve done it ugly, like digging in to cling to a lead in a gruesome 59-57 slugfest at Marquette. They’ve done it sexy, raining 11-21 from deep on Creighton to run away and hide in an 83-61 win at Cintas.
In every way imaginable, by every metric and every eye test, Xavier is a tournament team based on what they have done over the past couple of months when healthy. But…
Resumes are based on the entire season, not just the stretch run. There are still those of us who walk the earth that are old enough to remember when “last 10 games” showed up on team sheets, but those days are now gone. Xavier has built a monolith in the last two months. Unfortunately, they started from underground.
If Xavier is as good as we believe them to be, if they’re truly too good to leave out of the tournament, their resume as it stands now is different than what it will end up as. A team too good to be left out respects Marquette at a neutral site, but it won’t fear them. There’s too much that can happen for Xavier to let this be decided in a committee room next Sunday. This week in MSG, they’ll have the chance to remove all doubt on the court.