How far can Xavier go without bench depth?

Xavier as currently comprised consists of about seven players, plus the ghost of Kyky Tandy and an occasional cameo from Cesare Edwards or Kam Craft. The starting five of Souley Boum, Adam Kunkel, Colby Jones, Zach Freemantle, and Jack Nunge is etched in stone. Desmond Claude spells the guards, Jerome Hunter offers relief to the big men. That’s it. Xavier is 309th in the nation in bench minutes.

It’s working. Over their last 9 games, Xavier is 9-0, which is the best you can be in a 9-game stretch. Despite playing at a tempo that basically equates to a dead sprint, Xavier’s seven iron men have been clicking together into a formidable unit. Final Four contender UConn and Big East bugaboo Villanova have been the two most recent teams to fall to the onslaught of the Muskies’ all-action first unit.

Those two wins were great, but college basketball fans don’t buy team gear hoping for good Januarys. Legends are made in March.

All that as prelude to this: can a team built on such a short rotation have success in the tournament?

I’ve decided to dig into the numbers a little bit. Over the past four non-Covid tournaments - i.e., 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2022 - 37 high-major teams have both made the tournament and ended the year below 300th in bench minutes. On average, they’ve earned a six seed and won two games. In other words, they’ve been Sweet 16 squads. I suspect if I had offered you the second weekend of the tournament before this season began, you’d have been on board with it.

But wait! There’s more! When you take the expectations of seeding into account, the teams in question have actually exceeded expected tournament wins by about .4 wins per team. They’ve progressed as far as they could by beating teams seeded worse than them, then had about a coin-toss chance to win when faced with someone seeded equal to or better than they were.

The one potential spanner in the works is tempo. The average of these teams has been 200th in the country in tempo. Xavier is currently 18th. It is incredibly rare for a team to play both fast and shallow while still having success. Of the 37 high-majors in question, only 9 of them have been even in the top 100 in tempo. They’ve remained remarkably consistent with the greater data set though, earning on average a 5 seed and outperforming expectations by exactly half a win.

That 2017 UCLA team is actually a pretty decent comp for Xavier right now. Xavier is currently 7th in AdjO and 77th in AdjD; 2017 UCLA was 2nd and 85th. Both teams are in the 5 in 3p%, top 10 in assist rate, and top 20 in tempo. Basically, they played fast, hit their threes but didn’t depend on them, and shared the ball well. UCLA went to the Sweet 16 that year, where they lost to a UK team led by 39/3/4 on 13-20 shooting by De’Aaron Fox.

There are two big differences between that UCLA team and this Xavier one. The first is Lonzo Ball; Xavier doesn’t have a singular focus like that UCLA team did in Ball, who averaged 15/6/8 and was a projected lottery pick from the word go. The other is Steve Alford. If you can’t tell the difference between Alford and Sean Miller and why that’s important, I can’t help you.

So what have we learned? Maybe nothing that we didn’t already know. Deep and shallow teams can win. Fast and slow teams can win. What can’t win are bad teams. Xavier would obviously love to have more guys they could trust with more minutes. In the absence of that, the most important factor is being good at basketball. The Muskies currently are; if they remain that way, depth doesn’t matter.

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