What is there to even say?
The Big East might be having a down year, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a different beast than the non-conference slate. You can beat the Marists, UCs, and Missouri States of the world, but that doesn’t mean that you can waltz into the Big East. The Xavier team with the confidence that the announcers raved about learned that the hard way today. Any hope that this team had of playing themselves into the at-large conversation vanished in the first 40 minutes of the conference season. Just like that, it’s back to auto bid or bust.
And conclusively. Xavier was the favorite in this game way back when. We wrote in our preview that Creighton would shoot a lot of threes. They put up 33, a lot of them wide open as Xavier over-pursued runner after runner, leaving backside shooters wide open. Not since Lee Harvey Oswald have so many mediocre shooters had so much time. Austin Swartz shot 7-13 in this game and is still only shooting 36% this season.
But sometimes you run into a team on a heater. That’s true. It’s also true that sometimes you play the team into that heater. Xavier’s defense was absolutely appalling in this game. The Bluejays shot 58% in the first half. That’s torch hot. That was also their bad half. In the second half they shot 62.5%. Xavier shot 36.4% for the game, so it’s not like their offense was good, but it wouldn’t have mattered. One Xavier player posted an offensive efficiency over 100, Pape N’Diaye at 193. The next best was the 89 Roddie Anderson put up.
Want some more fun numbers? This was the most points Xavier ever allowed at the Cintas. This was their worst ever loss at the Cintas. The students weren’t there, by midway through the second half no one was, and that’s for the better. No one who saw this is going to want to watch Xavier basketball for awhile. They certainly won’t want to pay for the privilege. For the first time in a long time, even the effort was poor. At some point, the Musketeers just realize they were beaten.
That happens at some point in games. It happened in this one before the half. Even after a 16-2 Creighton run, Xavier was still well in this game. So they promptly allowed a 36-5 run. That pretty much ended this as a contest, as you would imagine. At the eight minute mark of the first half, X was down six and battling their way back. Eight minutes later they were down 27. That’s almost incomprehensible.
This game functionally ended this season as one in which Xavier will play their way on to the bubble. You don’t erase the stink of a 41 point Q3 loss at home. The Musketeers dropped 19 spots in the KenPom, they’ll plunge farther than that in the NET. There is nothing good to report here. The seeds sown in the first half against Missouri State have borne fruit. Xavier has been embarrassed.
Category: General Sports
