Outlook: 'Twas a tale of two seasons for the X-Men last year. The early hiccups generated some angst among the Xavier faithful, as first year head honcho Travis Steele struggled to find his footing while Chris Mack worked minor miracles at Louisville. But by mid-February, it all came together for the man who bumped shoulders with Mack for 10 years as an understudy to one of the sharpest coaching minds in the game. I’ll admit I had my own doubts about Steele’s coaching chops (bear in mind last year was his first season ever as a head coach), but shame on me for rushing to judgment on a guy groomed in the one of the most prestigious coaching pipelines in all of college basketball. What the Musketeers showed from Valentines’s Day until the end of the season is a sneak preview at what we should expect in 2019-20, a team with an established core crop of talent that simply needs to fill in some minor blanks around the edges.

The tone of this preview would sound a lot more bearish had the veteran foursome of Naji Marshall, Paul Scruggs, Quentin Goodin and Tyrique Jones chose to stay in the draft – thankfully, much to the pleasure of Travis Steele and Xavier fans everywhere, all four opted to return to Cincinnati for another bite at the apple in 2020. This veteran quartet accounted for 50 points a game last season, to go along with 23 rebounds, 12 assists, 4 steals and 2 blocks a contest.

Having such a solid foundation of production intact will pay big dividends, especially early on in the season, but I’m particularly fond of the way Scruggs and Goodin have molded into a yin and yang pairing on the perimeter. Both Scruggs and Goodin entered school with the “point guard” label slapped on their back, but over the past two seasons, Goodin has carved out his niche as the primary facilitator, which paved the way for Scruggs to blossom into more of an attack-minded scorer. While their skillsets are fairly similar in nature, their individual evolutions have molded them into a more effective duet in the backcourt.

At times last year, Scruggs was Xavier’s most reliable and most efficient scoring option, as Naji Marshall struggled mightily assimilating to his new role as offensive alpha dog. Granted, Marshall deserves some forgiveness for his volatile play. He was banged up on multiple occasions and asking him to seamlessly fill the shoes of a scoring savant like Trevon Bluiett was a bit unfair. However, those blemishes were wiped away by mid-Feburary and Xavier fans finally got a glimpse of Marshall’s limitless ceiling for the final month of the season. After a 6-game losing streak dropped the Musketeers to 4-8 in league play (and 11-13 overall), Marshall was the defibrillator that resurrected the X-Men’s season. In a thrilling 64-61 overtime win over Creighton on February 13th, Marshall paced the Muskies with 23 points, 7 boards and 5 assists, marking the first of six near flawless performances in a row.



During that run, it appeared the nagging back pain that had hampered him all season had finally subsided and Marshall promptly morphed into a stat sheet stuffer. Unsurprisingly, this coincided with Xavier righting the ship to the tune of a 5-game win stream before Marshall missed the regular season finale against St. John’s.