Year 1 under Billi Chambers might have been worse than the season that got the previous coach fired. Where does XU go from here?
Team: Xavier Musketeers
2023-24 Record: 1-27, 0-18 Big East
2023-24 Big East Finish: Dead last, four games behind 10th place DePaul.
Final 2023-24 Her Hoop Stats Ranking: #348 out of 360 Division 1 teams
Postseason? Just a 62-40 loss to #6 seed Georgetown in the first round of the conference tournament, which came six days after losing 66-46 at home to the Hoyas in the regular season finale.
Key Departures: Well, Xavier was turbo bad, so unsurprisingly there’s a lot of women who don’t want to be there any more. That label doesn’t apply to Nila Blackford and Taylor Smith, who wrapped up their bonus seasons of eligibility last season. FUN FACT: It was actually Smith’s sixth year of college due to an injury redshirt season when she first arrived in Cincinnati. Blackford was the leading rebounder last year at 8.1 per game, and she chipped in 9.0 rebounds per game, too. Smith was more of a rotational piece, appearing in 19 games with five starts and getting 14.5 minutes of burn on average.
Moving along to players landing at new locations, Xavier lost their leading scorer from last season to the transfer portal, but they’ll be seeing her again. Mackayla Scarlett started 19 times in 22 appearances and averaged 13.2 points per game. That was her fourth year of XU hoops, and she’ll be at Providence for her bonus season of eligibility.
In something of a positive for Xavier, it gets a little bit hard to refer to the remaining three transfers that I want to mention here as major contributors, but they clearly had a role on the team. Or, in the case of Shelby Calhoun, they would have had a role if not for a season ending injury. Calhoun only played in four games before being lost for the season, and she got 16 minutes of action per contest. Her best season with XU was her first after transferring from Virginia Tech, as she never matched that 7.7 points and 5.2 rebounds again. In any case, she has moved along to Stetson for at least her bonus season of eligibility.
The last two to mention here are Kaysia Woods and Aanaya Harris. Woods only appeared in 15 games but she did start 13 times and played more than 23 minutes on average. Harris was a bench piece for the Musketeers in all but one of her 23 appearances, and she averaged 16 minutes a night. Woods was kind of a helpful scorer at 7.5 per game, which was fourth best on the team last year. She’s at SMU now, while Harris ended up at Charlotte, who may or may not have had space because Marquette hired their coach.
Key Returners: I will reiterate the same point I made last year in this section. When you go 1-27 and finish the season on a 19 game losing streak, is anyone at all on the roster truly a key contributor? Everyone has to have a leading scorer, leading rebounder, etc., but at some point, everything’s real bad and nothing truly matters about who contributed what.
In any case, familiar face Aizhanique Mayo will be Xavier’s leading returning scorer. Once she officially got cleared to play following her “leave Marquette, go to Iona at semester, follow coach to Xavier” adventure, Mayo was a double digit scorer for Xavier once she got cleared eligibility-wise and a pretty dangerous three-point shooter at 37% on more than five attempts per game. She’s the only returning player who averaged more than seven points per game, so the Musketeers might need a whole bunch from her.
This is probably a low bar, but Tae’lor Purvis is the leading returning rebounder. She tied for second on the team last year, but Blackford and Scarlett are gone, so she’s the leader….. at 3.1 per game. Good news: That was a career high after three seasons at Houston! Purvis is also the returning assists leader and she got there by being the team leader last year…… at 2.6 per game. Mix that together with 6.6 points per game, and she had a pretty solid overall season, but that doesn’t jump off the page at you as “is going to have a monster 2024-25.”
Daniela Lopez is Xavier’s top returning minutes per game average player, so it feels safe to think that she’ll be getting a lot of playing time again next year. She added 6.6 points, 2.6 rebounds, and 1.1 assists per game and struggled to shoot threes, so I don’t know if we can say it was a quality 30 minutes per night, but there was a lot of things going wrong for XU last season.
Julia Garcia Roig was a part-time starter for Xavier, getting out there at the tip in 14 of her 26 contests, and most of those starts were in late January onwards. She was averaging 27 minutes a game as a starter in that stretch, but just 2.7 points, 2.3 rebounds, and 2.5 assists. Lika Kvirkvelia had a month long run as a starter for Xavier last year where she averaged 1.4 points and 2.0 rebounds per game. At 6’4”, it would seem that the international Georgian could have a big impact on the league, but she wasn’t asked to carry that load for the Musketeers last year.
There’s also Loren Christie on the roster, who missed last season with an injury. She’s never averaged more than six points or five rebounds per game in three years with Buffalo and one with San Francisco. It would seem that she came to Xavier for her extra year and after a year off, perhaps she’ll be extra motivated and perhaps she was supposed to have a big role for the Musketeers last year.
Key Additions: There are five freshmen on this roster, and four of them are coming to Cincinnati from overseas. I’m going to presume that there’s not a lot of information on those four out there in the scouting world, and as such, it’s a total mystery as to whether or not they can make a gigantic impact for Xavier right away.
Xavier also adds two transfers, both of whom spent two years at their previous stop. Petra Oborilova is the most interesting one by default, as the 6’2” forward from Slovakia was recruited to Iona by Billi Chambers, the current XU head coach, but then stayed at Iona for a year without Chambers, and now joins her in Cincinnati. Weird! In any case, Oborilova didn’t play much under Chambers as a freshman, but she started in all 30 of her appearances and played 29 minutes a game this past season. She chipped in 7.1 points, 3.7 rebounds, and 1.4 assists for the Gaels, and she shot just short of 41% from long range on more than four attempts a night.
The other transfer is Irune Orio, who comes over from Sacramento State. If you go from Sacramento to Cincinnati, does it count as “closer to home” when you’re from Spain? The 6’2” guard, much like her fellow transfer, didn’t do much as a freshman, but had a pretty solid sophomore campaign. 28 starts in 31 appearances, more than 30 minutes per night, 9.4 points, 3.8 rebounds, 1.2 assists is all pretty good stuff. Orio wasn’t much of a shooter in terms of accuracy at under 32% from long range, but she fired up 3.6 attempts per game on a team that liked to shoot a lot of threes.
Coach: Billi Chambers, entering her second season with the Musketeers and 12th as a Division 1 head coach. She has a record of 1-27 in Cincinnati and a record of 142-180 overall.
Outlook: Melanie Moore was let go as Xavier’s head coach with a record of 24 wins and 81 losses, and her final Musketeers team went 7-23 but completely winless in the Big East, including losing their first round Big East tournament game. That team finished the year at #280 in the Her Hoop Stats ratings and #220 in the NET. I want to be 100% clear on this: They were very bad.
That cost Melanie Moore her job.
Billi Chambers came to Cincinnati fresh off an NCAA tournament bid at Iona…….but she had a losing record across 10 seasons at 141-153. The schedules at Iona are what the schedules are, but the fact of the matter is that if you went to two NCAA tournaments in 10 years at Iona and still had a losing record through 10 seasons, you did a lot of losing around those NCAA bids.
Xavier returned six players from their 2022-23 rotation. That’s never a guarantee that you’re going to automatically be better, but it is a platform of familiarity with each other that a brand new coach can use to start building their version of a team.
We can not, under any circumstances, say that Billi Chambers made Xavier better than they were before she arrived.
There’s the flat fact that Xavier won just a single game all of last season. There’s the fact that they were winless in the Big East for a second straight season, running their losing streak against league foes, including the Big East tournament, to 44 straight games.
But that’s just a continuation of losing, it’s not actually measuring Xavier getting worse. The Musketeers went from #280 in the Her Hoop Stats ratings to #348. They went from #220 in the NET to #321. Moore’s last team was a bad team even by high major/multi-bid conference standards. Chambers’ first team was one of the worst teams in the country.
I’ll put one more pin on this and even add a qualifier to it: 2023-24 Xavier got outscored on average in 18 Big East regular season games by a margin of 77.6 to 50.4. The qualifier: The Big East intentionally adjusted the schedule to 18 games and thus only fed the Musketeers to UConn once. Yes, losing by 46 one time tips that average margin a little higher. It’s also not the only reason that they averaged a margin of defeat of more than 27 points in 18 games.
I will cut Billi Chambers and last year’s Xavier roster a little bit of slack in one department. The fact of the matter is that there’s one woman who played all 28 games for the Musketeers last season. Only two women played in 27 of 28. Things were so dire for Xavier’s health as a team in early December that they 1) canceled two games and as a result took eight days off because they did not have enough healthy players and 2) convinced Delaney Hogan from the XU volleyball team to join the roster so they would have enough bodies floating around. Hogan didn’t even give them a reprieve on the floor as she played just seven total minutes across seven games, but that’s how bad things were in terms of holding practice.
It’s real hard to be good as a basketball team when you’re having to count heads on a daily basis to see who’s actually in uniform to play. With that said, Xavier had just dropped to 0-7 in the game before the first one that they canceled, so it’s clear that XU was going to be in a lot of hot water anyway.
And so we turn the page on the Musketeers to 2024-25…… and I am completely out of reasons or ideas to suggest that they’re going to be lightyears better, as in “Big East opponents will actually be afraid of losing to them.” Think about it this way: Merely being the worst Power 5 team in the country would qualify as a massive improvement for Xavier. And that’s still really bad! They could still finish last in the Big East by multiple games and we might be able to say “well, that was better than last year and the year before, if we’re being honest.” Are they going to be interesting? Almost assuredly not! Merely being competitive comes before being interesting, and there’s a Snake River sized canyon that Xavier has to jump before they can even get to being called competitive.