Is depth a big deal in March Madness for Xavier?

Xavier currently consists of about seven players, with the ghost of Kyky Tandy and occasional cameos from Cesare Edwards or Kam Craft. The first five of him, Souley Boum, Adam Kunkel, Colby Jones, Zach Freemantle and Jack Nunge are etched in stone. Desmond Claude spells the guards and Jerome Hunter provides relief to the big guys. that’s it. Xavier’s bench appearance time is 309th in the nation.

it’s working. In the last nine games, Xavier is on his 9-0 record, which is his best of nine games in a row. Despite playing at a tempo that basically amounts to dead sprinting, Xavier’s seven Iron Men combine to form a formidable unit.final four candidate U Conn When big east bugaboo Villanova Here are the two most recent teams that have fallen under the onslaught of the Muskie’s all-action first unit.

Those two wins were great, but college basketball fans don’t buy their team’s gear in hopes of a good January. Legends are made in March.

As a preface, could a team built with such a short rotation be successful in a tournament?

I decided to dig a little deeper into the numbers. In the last four non-Covid tournaments in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022, 37 major major teams have both qualified for the tournament and finished the year with less than 300 minutes on the bench. On average, they take his 6th seed and have 2 wins. So the Sweet 16 team. If you had suggested a second weekend of tournaments before the start of this season, you would have been on board.

wait a minute! There are more! Taking into account the seeding expectations, the teams in question actually beat their expected tournament wins by about 0.4 per team. They have progressed as best they can by beating teams seeded worse than them. Then I had a chance to win the coin toss when I was faced with a team with the same or a better seed than myself.

One potential spanner at work is Tempo. The average tempo for these teams ranks him 200th in the country. Xavier is currently ranked 18th. It is very rare for a team to play fast and shallow while achieving success. The problem is that out of 37 high majors, he’s only made the top 100 in tempo nine of them. But they were very consistent with the larger dataset, and on average he got 5 seeds, beating expectations by just half a win.

That 2017 UCLA The team is actually a pretty decent comp for Xavier right now. Xavier is currently 7th in AdjO and 77th in AdjD. 2017 UCLA was him 2nd and he was 85th. On both teams, he is in the top 5 in 3p%, top 10 in assist percentage, and top 20 in tempo. Basically they played fast and hit threes but didn’t depend on them and shared the ball well. UCLA entered the Sweet 16 that year and his 13-20 shot from De’Aaron Fox saw him lose to the British team led by 39/3/4.

There are two big differences between that UCLA team and this Xavier team. The first is Lonzo Ball. Xavier doesn’t have a single focus like UCLA teams averaging 15/6/8 did with the ball. Another is Steve Alford. What if you don’t know the difference between Alford and Sean Miller and why it matters?

So what have we learned? Maybe there’s nothing we didn’t know yet. Deep and shallow teams can win. Both fast and slow teams can win. It’s a bad team that doesn’t win. Xavier clearly wants to have more reliable players with more time. Without that, the most important factor is being good at basketball. Muskies are now: Depth doesn’t matter if they are intact.

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