Notre Dame's Everett Golson is the graduate transfer Xavier basketball needs

Stay with me here. What is Xavier's biggest question mark heading into the 2015-2016 season? It's clearly point guard play. Edmond Sumner and LAJ both show potential, but neither has given any indication of being a dead solid lock for a starting point guard for the team. Meanwhile, Xavier has two open scholarships.

I know Everett Golson is technically a football player, but there is perhaps no football position that overlaps with a basketball one as well as QB overlaps with PG. Both need to be able to command the focus and respect of their teammates. Both need to be able to call plays and then rescue plays when things break down. Both have the ball in their hands and the responsibility of distributing it to teammates looking to score. When you think about it, Golson's transition from helmet and pads to the Xavier uniform is almost pre-ordained.

There's more though. Golson was in fact an all-state point guard in high school. He started for a state championship winning team as a sophomore and averaged 19.6/4.7/5.0 as a junior. Apparently he was pretty well thought of, because he had committed to UNC to play basketball at one point before decommitting and signing on to play both sports at Notre Dame. His ESPN recruiting scouting report notes that he was "a high-major athlete and passer at the lead guard spot... He's very difficult to pressure and contain because of his explosiveness... [he] has always been able to attack in transition by getting to the basket and finishing... he has improved tremendously on his jumper [and] is now a consistent three-point shooter off the catch."

Before the NCAA championship game in which Notre Dame lost to Alabama, Golson said that he like football but basketball was his first love. With SEC by-laws possibly keeping him from transferring to any school in that conference and Notre Dame restricting the list of other football programs to which they would release him, landing in the perfect football environment seems like a long shot for Golson. Transferring to play basketball at a school that doesn't even have a football program would be the perfect way for him to pursue his first love and thumb his nose at the Irish.

After missing on Trey Lewis and a handful of grad transfer forwards, Everett Golson would be the kind of splash that gets Xavier in the news for the right reasons. Beyond that though, he's a talented basketball player who ticks a lot of the boxes on the Muskies wish list. He can run the point, he's tough, he can shoot the ball, he's experienced, and he's only going to be around for one year. If he doesn't work out, the point guard position is no worse off that it is today. If he does, Xavier will have a national interest story the likes of which we haven't seen since the media discovered that our center drove for Uber. This move makes sense for both sides; let's hope they can get it done.