It’s not that hard to be 4-0 right now. It takes real competition to see how good a team is.
There’s a very real sense in which we don’t know much about the Xavier Musketeers at this point. Yes, they are 4-0, but so are 44 other teams including powers like Furman, Longwood, and the mighty Thunderbirds of Southern Utah. This early season start isn’t really indicative of much beyond a pretty weak schedule right now.
That is, of course, the way of the world for power conference teams. Of those 4-0 teams, 11 currently reside in the top 21 of KenPom along with 5-0 Pitt. Good teams schedule bad teams this time of year to get things sorted and get rotations ready for the time of the year when they start to make NET ranking hay. Undefeated UConn has played the 362nd worst schedule in the nation. Iowa St is undefeated and eighth in the KP and has played the easiest schedule in the nation.
So when do things actually get serious for Xavier? The simple answer is not until the Crosstown Shootout on December 14th. The Musketeers play an MTE over Thanksgiving (more on that in a moment), then take on South Carolina St, TCU, and Morgan St. Two of those are buy game, the third is a Horned Frogs team that scraped past Texas St and then got whacked by Michigan.
And that brings us to Thanksgiving. Xavier starts the Fort Myers Tip-Off with South Carolina. The Gamecocks are 2-2 and lost to North Florida, a team who has never made the NCAA tournament and plays two of their next four against D2 opponents. Should Xavier beat them, and they should, they finally get a shot at a decent opponent if Michigan beats are pretty mediocre Va. Tech squad.
That’s if you assume Michigan is good. KenPom does, he has them ranked 27th right now. Wash preseason bias out on Bart Torvik and they’re 20th. That’s all well and good, but Wake beat them by two. Xavier, if you’ll recall walked away from the Demon Deacons in the second half on their way to a 15 point win.
Michigan is likely good. They, and UC, represent Xavier’s chances to impress the committee before conference play gets started. For those of us who remember the A10 days well, were, indeed, forged by them, that seems like a recipe for disaster. One, maybe two, Q1 games before conference? Yikes.
This isn’t that anymore, though. Xavier has roughly a million chances in the Big East to get big wins and needs only to avid losing to hilariously bad Georgetown or just regular bad DePaul in order to avoid serious issue. Xavier should get tested, but not unduly so, in this MTE. Two wins is well within the realm of possibility. Losing to anyone not wearing bright yellow is a concern. The Musketeers will get their chance to show how good they are. We just have to wait awhile longer.