The Musketeers have some very heavy lifting to do
I am not, by nature, a negative person. Sure, that’s the role I play on the podcast and how the rest of the staff here sees me, but I always think the best will eventually happen. No point in getting too down when the next dawn is just around the corner. I went to an NIT game once and actually cheered.
So it brings me no joy to say that this season is on life support. The Musketeers are one loss from being dead, two losses from being what we call in the business “super dead.” X is 55th in the NET, 68th in KPI, 60th in SOR (the results based metrics), 40th in BPI, and 44th in KenPom (the predictive metrics). If you are wondering which of those augurs well, it’s none of them.
So how does Xavier solve this? We’ve talked about this almost ad nauseum, but the Musketeers needed five wins in their last eight games. That hasn’t changed, although the amount of games to get those wins has changed. Five wins still does it. Right now, X is 6-10 in the top two quads. That gets you in nine times out of ten. That tenth? When you have two home Q3 losses.
The rest of the way goes Q2, Q1, Q4, Q3, Q1, Q1. God bless the Big East. That 5-1 pushes X to 18-13 overall and 12-8 in the conference. It would also make Xavier 9-11 in the top two quadrants. That gets you a bid. Does 8-12 at this point? Probably not.
By the numbers Xavier’s odds aren’t great. KenPom says X’s win probability goes 66%, 23%, 98%, 80%, 42%, and 44%. Bart Torvik goes 67%, 19%, 96%, 74%, 35%, and 43%. Aggregate those and you get the chances of Xavier running the table at between 55% and 58%. Unfortunately, that’s not how math works when it comes to basketball.
The good news is that KenPom sees Xavier stealing at least one of the “toss up” games. Anything within 10% of 50% is something that the algorithm sees as reasonably close game. Think one to two possessions. Torvik is slightly less bullish and has X at 3-3 the rest of the way. Thus far this season Xavier is 3-5 in one or two possession games. That means they are just barely underperforming the numbers. Their luck number of 299th in the nation bears that out. An optimist can see some regression to the mean happening and Xavier sneaking a win. A pessimist sees a team that does the dumb stuff at the worst possible times.
Say that 5-1 does happen. That would land X at .6 wins above bubble. No team over 0.1 WAB failed to make the tournament last season. Lose at Butler and X is at -.2 or -.3 (it’s an inexact science). That’s big yikes. That also lands Xavier, very tentatively, playing Georgetown to start the BET. That would earn them a chance to play a big gun with a shot to earn a bid in the second round. Win there and you have a coin flip chance.
5-1 is a must to lock up a bid. 4-2 leaves Xavier needing something in the BET to have a chance. We’ve gone over this over and over. Xavier has to start winning. Time is running out. It’s still possible to get this done, but time gets shorter as the days get longer.