Xavier is still recruiting and signing four-year players; is one-and-done the way forward?

If you were watching over the weekend, you no doubt noticed that two of the highest-profile recruits to which Xavier has ever been linked are off the board for X. Elite 2016 PG Kobi Simmons cancelled his planned official visit to Xavier and scheduled one to UNLV in its place (he'll regret that when he's missing February in Cincinnati to be stuck in Las Vegas instead). Markelle Fultz - another top 2016 guard - went a step further and verbally committed to the University of Washington.

Both of those players had Xavier fans cautiously excited about what the 2016 recruiting class might do for the team. Neither of them ended up even beginning to pay out on that excitement.

In their place is Quentin Goodin, an ESPN 100 guard from Kentucky. Goodin is a very good recruit by all reports, but he figures to be more of a program player than a program changer. He's the kind of recruit that 300 division one schools would love to be getting, but then again, 300 division one schools don't start out every year with the expectations that Xavier has.

During all this, we got plenty of messages on Twitter and Facebook - you guys know we have a Facebook page, right? - and here talking up Goodin as a solid four-year guy in contrast to the one-and-done that Fultz or Simmons would have presumably been. I can understand the desire to look at Goodin and want to extrapolate his current skills developing over a nice career at X, but it also wasn't that long ago that my heart was aflutter over an ESPN 100 guard Xavier signed named Brandon Randolph.

I think the question becomes, who gets Xavier closer to the Final Four? Does four years of Goodin give us more progress to that end than one or two years of Simmons or Fultz would have? If Simmons or Fultz would have been a bigger step, is it worth changing the DNA of the program to make that progress?

For myself, I don't know the answer to that last question. I know that I want to see Xavier hang that National Championship banner in Cintas one day. Ideally, I'd like to see a group of Dee Davis-style seniors leading the team to the mountaintop. Would it still be as special if it were five freshmen who were walking off campus and into the draft at the end of the season? I don't know. Do you?