Xavier is currently on schedule to have no freshman playing next season.
Aldous Huxley called it A Brave New World. Like a lot of the literature of the time, Huxley tortured his premise almost beyond recognition as he used hundreds of pages to make a point that he could have in ten. The title is borrowed from a line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but rather than layering the meaning of the original work, Huxley bludgeons us with it. Did you ever wonder if too much of a good thing could possibly be bad? So does Huxley, he just wants to bore you to death along with it. (Also, there is a night and swimwear company called Soma now, which is a bit amusing.)
What does any of that have to do with Xavier basketball, you are undoubtedly wondering. Well, the good thing of players getting to choose where they go and finally getting paid has overwhelmed the traditional landscape of college basketball. The latest casualty of that is Jonathan Powell, who has asked to be released from his National Letter of Intent with Xavier. If you want to hear a long discussion on NIL, listen below.
Powell wasn’t just some also-ran recruit who was here to fill a roster spot. He is a top 100 recruit who is top 25 as a shooting guard. He’s a high major player with a ton of upside. In almost any other season he would be a huge part of what Xavier was going to do going forward.
And that brings us to our brave new world. At the guard position Xavier has Trey Green, Dayvion McKnight, and Dailyn Swain returning. All of them are established players who have demonstrated they can handle themselves at this level. Sean Miller then went out and got Marcus Foster, Dante Maddox Jr., and Ryan Conwell. Powell would have been one of seven and the only one who hadn’t played, and played well, at the college level. There’s not exactly going to be a ton of space at the three, either, with Jerome Hunter entering the mix there.
That has to be disorientating to a young man like Jonathan Powell. He’s waited his whole life for this chance and suddenly he’s looking up at a roster of all-conference players. Sean Miller needed good guards, so he acquired an all-star squad of them. By almost any count, Xavier has a top 10 transfer class coming in. Unfortunately, that has squeezed out their only freshman.
Brave New World ends with, you guessed, the person who railed against the over-consumption and control being killed after dallying with it. (I told you Huxley wasn’t subtle.) Whether college basketball goes the same way or learns to dial things back a bit remains to be seen. The system isn’t inherently broken, it’s just changing faster than the guardrails can keep up. For Xavier that means they’ve lost the one piece they had coming in that they could possibly have built a future around.