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Can Xavier make the tournament with this defense? A historical examination

The title of the post says basically everything you need to know, but let’s set a few parameters. First, Xavier’s offense is currently 27th in the country according to KenPom, from whom we will be taking all our tempo-free stats for the duration of this post. This places them somewhere outside of elite, but still very good on the offensive end.

Speaking of outside of elite, Xavier’s defense is 150th, comfortably clear of the elite range. In fact, that’s actually really bad. This is almost entirely because they can’t force turnovers and only 5 teams in the country give up a higher percentage of their points surrendered from behind the arc.