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What if Xavier let recruiting rankings set the depth chart?

Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Hi everyone! If you're like me, your summer basketball fandom is split between kind of following recruiting because there's nothing else to do and daydreaming about Xavier being back in season. Sometimes those two spheres of rumination drift together. Obviously there's an extent to which whatever happens in the rest of recruiting is going to dictate what it looks like when Xavier is back in season.

Since we're still six and a half months from meaningful basketball, let's expand that to the most absurd possible conclusion: what if Coach Mack let the recruiting rankings dictate the depth chart?

Obviously you can't just plug some stars into a chart and call it good. I took the composite ranking for each player per Verbal Commits, weighted it a bit so the rankings correlated more closely with a real amount of minutes a player might get, and gave everyone a total number of minutes they could play. Then I game them each minutes at their respective positions and called it good. Here's what it looks like:

PG SG SF PF C
Sumner 18:00 Davis 14:32 Gates 15:40 Jones 19:07 O'Mara 15:05
Goodin 17:40 Goodin 10:01 Macura 14:20 Bluiett 17:40 Ekiyor 15:05
Davis 04:20 Macura 09:34 Bluiett 10:00 Gates 03:14 Gaston 05:02
Sumner 05:54 Jones 04:47


There you have it. The takeaway is that there are no takeaways. Obviously players develop in ways that recruiting rankings didn't reflect at the time. Quentin Goodin's probably not going to end up leading the team in minutes, nor is RaShid Gaston going to get less court time this year than LAJ did last year. Regardless of what happens between now and November, Xavier is going to be in solid position when the ball goes up for the first time.