Xavier 71-79 SJU: A collapse, a refshow, a disaster, a missed opportunity

When the margin for the season is razor thin, you can’t do stuff like this.

I really try not to swear. I don’t begrudge those of you who do, some of you are quite proficient. I just try not to do it. This basketball game strained every bit of that personal ethos. I returned from coaching a soccer game in which I repeatedly reminded my high school age players not to yell at the referees, then watched this. It made me want to go back in time and heap invective on every single referee in every single game I’ve ever watched.

We’ll get to the game (even though I really don’t want to), but we’re going to talk about that tragicomic display of officiating incompetence. If I were as bad at my job as Roger Ayers and Brian O’Connell are at theirs, people would die on the daily. Ayres (I don’t care how that jackass spells his name, so I’m just guessing) was even taking time to exchange banter with the equally horrendous Donny Marshall as the game went on. Why focus on what you’re doing when you can just haphazardly guess and make the same money? Let’s have some laughs with the announcer. Someone fire that clown all the way into the sun.

St. John’s went full HAVOC in the second half, and you can’t blame them. Actually, for a team involved in a game that so fully made me want to drink glass and gasoline, SJU was pretty unobjectionable. If I knew I wasn’t going to get called for anything, I’d slap everyone as well. At least they didn’t preen about it and there’s even something a little charming about the way it seems like Kadary Richmond has only ever watched people shoot a basketball and never actually been taught.

The Red Storm rode their crowd, and full credit to them as well, and their friends in black and white back into the game. The excellent book Scorecasting as well as studies from Frontiers in Psychology, The University of Chicago, The University of Samford, and several more Google pages of learned journal articles all establish that all home court advantage is is the crowd preying on people’s desire to be liked. Referees essentially make calls in high stress situations that they (usually subconsciously) believe will get the most people on their side.

So in that sense you can’t fault Brian O’Connell for the fact that evolutionary development has led him to the place where his tiny brain overrules the evidence of his eyes. He doesn’t care what he can objectively see, the lizard part of his brain tells him that danger awaits if he doesn’t go with the crowd. Also, he sucks. At everything.

Take away the fouls not called, the bizarre wandering Zuby Ejiofor does without dribbling, and Dailyn Swain being injured on another obvious no call and just count the things that were obvious rule interpretations gotten wrong. In the first half a player, possibly Richmond, planted his entire foot out of bounds to make a save and throw it to a teammate for a layup. The ref was right there, but he missed it. Two points. In the second half RJ Luis and Dailyn Swain went up for a ball at midcourt. Luis caught it, established three points in the frontcourt, then stepped into the backcourt. Swain and the Xavier bench frantically signaled for the over and back, but it wasn’t called. Two points. Finally, with Xavier up eight, Ryan Conwell ran down a fastbreak and very clearly slapped the ball of the SJU player’s knee. Roger Aires got the call correct, but BOC, never one to care a whit about right and wrong, sprinted from across the court and unsighted to change the call. Why? God knows. Two points.

That’s six. If you’re counting at home, and if you’re an O’Connell family member I’ll let you ask the person reading you this article explain to you how to count, you’ll note that six completely undeserved and inarguably incorrectly awarded points would have changed the course of this game because it never would have gone into overtime.

I used to say I hated blaming losses on the refs. I don’t anymore. These guys suck. Had they any shame they’d be ashamed. If Brian O’Connell wasn’t a completely craven, utterly morally bereft, piece of human detritus, Xavier would have won this game. He deserves the blame. Granted, he probably pleasures himself to seeing others suffer pain from his incompetence, but I’m not going to let that prevent me from calling this his fault.

Xavier choked

None of the 787 words before this change that Xavier spit the bit tonight. I wrote an article extolling the virtue of Dayvion McKnight and then he went 2-11 from the floor and appeared completely terrified of the idea of squaring his shoulder to well, anything, really. Only two Xavier players had offensive efficiency above average, and neither of them were Zach Freemantle or Ryan Conwell, who both went cold when it mattered. Conwell seems indisposed to taking a game over. Freemantle basically just demonstrated that he can’t make a shot while also holding Zuby Ejiofor up with his off arm, so maybe that’s not his fault.

Xavier’s bench sucks

““In that overtime game we didn’t have one bench player make a field goal… That shit is stupid.” That’s not me swearing, that’s the head coach. And no, it’s not a roster construction problem. It’s that Dante Maddox and John Hugley were both very effective last year, then forgot how to do that this year. Jerome Hunter remains an adventure, but not the fun kind. Hugely… my goodness. He’s the kind of bad right now that makes you go from livid to genuinely concerned for him. I am, charitably, 5-9, 175. I couldn’t be less effective than he is. I know that because in the seven minutes he played this game he managed an efficiency rating of zero.

Dailyn Swain is hurt

The ankle isn’t broken, but it is sprained. That’s not necessarily a good thing. A bad sprain is worse than a small break. No one on the team can do the things Dailyn does. He’s going to be out for awhile.

Somehow, this wasn’t that bad

Sure, Xavier blew a 16 point lead, collapsed like souffle that someone karate chopped, and somehow managed to lose by eight, but in a vacuum this really only merits a shrug. A 79-71 loss on a Q1 road game isn’t awful. X needed one of Marquette and St. John’s and they got one. Yes, it’s true that it will be all these almost games that keep this team out of the tournament eventually, but we aren’t there yet. For now we can keep lying to ourselves that there is a chance.