Last year’s Xavier team was probably the best one the school has ever seen. They secured a one see, won the Big East regular season title, put five players into the professional ranks, and finished the season with 29 wins. They also lost two games to Villanova by a combined total of 40 points. A 24 point loss on the road in January was followed by an only mildly more palatable 16 points loss at home in February that was both Xavier’s only home loss and their only loss at all in a two month span.
Yesterday, Xavier’s weakest team of the analytics era, a team coming off a recent six game losing streak and one harboring only the faintest of at-large hopes, beat Nova by 12 in game that somehow wasn’t even that close as the clock ticked down.