They didn’t do much successfully last year, and they lose a bunch from their rotation, and don’t add much in the way of obvious immediate impact.
Team: Xavier Musketeers
2024-25 Record: 7-24, 1-17 Big East
2024-25 Big East Finish: 11th and last, three games behind Georgetown, and only a layup with six seconds remaining separated the Musketeers from 1-17 and 0-18.
Final 2024-25 Rankings
NET: #247
Her Hoop Stats: #309
BartTorvik.com: #206
Postseason? In one of the bigger shocks of the entire season, Xavier beat #6 seeded DePaul in the Big East tournament first round, 80-73. They had a reasonable chance to topple #3 Seton Hall in the quarterfinals, but ended up with a 48-40 loss.
Notable Departures: You always have to start these things with the players that the coaching staff knew they were losing. In this case, that’s Loren Christie and Tae’lor Purvis. That means Xavier’s moving to a new season while losing their #2 and #4 scorers from last year who happen to double as the team’s top two rebounders. The fact that they averaged less than 8 points and 4 rebounds is not the point.
From there, we move on to the transfers. Xavier has three women who had a rotation role last year who have transferred to continue their college basketball experience. I am going to start with Aizhanique Mayo because she’s the top scoring transfer at 7.3 points per game. She’s also the most eyebrow raising transfer because she 1) enrolled at Marquette, 2) left the team right before her freshman year started, 3) transferred closer to home at Iona at semester break, 4) sat out the rest of the year, 5) averaged 10.1 points in 28 minutes off the bench in her actual freshman year, 6) transferred to follow Iona head coach Billi Chambers to Xavier, 7) still kept coming off the bench even though Xavier was terrible last year, 8) started and put up a 27 point outing in Xavier’s shocking upset of DePaul in the conference tournament, and finally 9) transferred to DePaul with two years of eligibility remaining.
What is happening here?
There are two more outbound transfers. First is Daniela Lopez, who heads to East Tennessee State after losing her starting spot as a freshman and having her minutes cut, but didn’t see that much of a dropoff in terms of her contributions of 5.4 points and 2.1 rebounds this past year. The other is Irune Orio, who started 20 times while appearing in all 31 games after transferring in from Sacramento State. She was more productive in the Big Sky than she was at Xavier (3.5 points, 3.2 rebounds in 17.9 minutes) and she’ll spend her final year of eligibility at Pepperdine.
Xavier also has a mystery departure in Julia Garcia Roig, who played in 56 games over the past two years. She averaged 2.9 points a game in 30 appearances last year, and as far as I can tell, the 5’7” guard from Spain hasn’t landed at a new Division 1 destination.
Notable Returners: Losing five women who played in all 31 games last season and another that appeared in 30 is an awful lot, but Xavier does have three rotation players returning. The biggest one is Meri Kanerva, who was their only double digit scorer last season at 11.2 a game. She also led the team in assists at 3.4 a night, and she grabbed 2.4 rebounds and 1.3 steals, too. Kanerva was the only Musketeer to play in over 1,000 minutes last season, so that’s a whole heck of a lot of continuity just by keeping her around.
Petra Oborilova was a slow transfer from Iona, taking an extra year to follow her head coach to Cincinnati. The 6’2” forward from Slovakia was less productive with Xavier as a junior than she was as a sophomore with Iona, but more productive than she was when Billi Chambers was coaching her in New Rochelle. Her numbers aren’t jump off the page worthy, but at 2.8 rebounds per game, she is Xavier’s leading returning rebounder. Lucia Martinez Lopez is the other rotation player coming back after starting in 10 of her 28 appearances as a freshman, and all of those came after mid-January.
Key Additions: Xavier is going half freshmen, half transfers in replacing what they lost by way of eligibility or transfer. None of the four freshman are noted by Blue Star Basketball, and there’s nothing in any of their team bios that explodes off the page at you, either. Three of the four are from outside the United States, which tilts the balance of the team to eight international players and six Americans.
Four of the six Americans on the roster are the four transfers coming in, but none of them shout “immediately obvious impact player” at you. Mya Moore (6’2” forward) will get a notable ovation when Xavier comes to the McGuire Center as she’s a Milwaukee kid who attended Pius XI. She had a nice sophomore year at Seattle, averaging 12.7 points and 7.6 rebounds, as well as over an assist, block, and steal per game. But Moore spent junior year at Cleveland State and played less than 8 minutes a game for a team that finished third in the Horizon League.
Mariyah Noel and Audia Young both come to Xavier after playing two years in the SEC. Noel (5’11” guard) played 316 total minutes in 39 games at Ole Miss, while Young (5’9” guard) was a rotation player at 13.5 minutes a game for Auburn this past year. Finally, Savannah White (6’2” guard/forward) started off her collegiate career at Wisconsin, but after appearing in six games for the Badgers as a freshman, the Minnesotan moved on to Indiana State for the past two campaigns. She averaged 6.9 points and 5.8 rebounds last year while starting 25 times in 31 games.
Coach: Billi Chambers, entering her third season with the Musketeers and 13th as a Division 1 head coach. She is now 8-51 in Cincinnati and 149-204 overall.
Outlook: Xavier hasn’t won 10 games in a season since 2018-19, when they went 11-19. They have been ranked below #230 in the country in either offense or defense by Her Hoop Stats (sometimes both!) in every season since 2016-17. They haven’t had a winning season since a 17-13 campaign in 2015-16. The Musketeers haven’t been on the winning side of a conference schedule since going 14-0 in the Atlantic 10 back in 2010-11.
They aren’t a perennial basement dweller. They are one of the worst teams in the country.
I’ll write the outlook section for them when they show that I should spend my time doing that. Until then? Team bad.
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