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Xavier Basketball: Musketeers 2022-23 season preview

By Josh Mullenix

Xavier head coach Sean Miller speaks during his introduction to Xavier fans, Friday, March 25, 2022, at the Cintas Center in Cincinnati.Sean Miller 011
Xavier head coach Sean Miller speaks during his introduction to Xavier fans, Friday, March 25, 2022, at the Cintas Center in Cincinnati.Sean Miller 011 /
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Colby Jones Adam Kunkel Xavier Basketball (Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images) /

Xavier Basketball hasn’t been to the NCAA Tournament since 2018. Can Sean Miller lead them back to March in his second go-around with the Musketeers?

There are few teams in the country that were more up and down a season ago than Xavier Basketball.

For starters, Travis Steele declared in the preseason a year ago that he expects his team to win the Big East. And, to be fair, Xavier was up to the challenge through non-conference play. They were 10-1 through 11 games with wins over Ohio State, Oklahoma State, and Cincinnati and began conference play with a win against Marquette.

The rest of the season was…interesting.

For the rest of Big East play, the Musketeers had a 7-11 record and they ended the season with five straight losses between Feb. 16 and March 2 before beating Georgetown in the regular season finale. Then, with their NCAA tournament hopes hanging in the balance – along with Travis Steele’s job – Xavier went to New York and lost to Butler in the first round of the Big East Tournament in overtime.

Naturally, they went on to win the NIT after missing out on the Big Dance. Normal year. Normal sport. The collapse down the stretch led to Steele’s firing and the reintroduction of Sean Miller. Miller was at the helm of the Xavier program from 2005 to 2009 before he left for Arizona. He led the Musketeers to four tournaments in five years, part of a 17-year stretch where they made 15 tournaments.

In four years, Steele failed to get to March Madness despite having more than one team capable of getting there. As a result, one FBI investigation removed from his first stint in Cincinnati, Miller is back for a second go around with sanctions looming in the shadows.

He takes over a program that hasn’t finished in the top 45 at KenPom since Chris Mack left and hasn’t finished over .500 in Big East play since 2018. So what does Miller have to work with in the second rendition of year one? Let’s take a look at his starters, bench players, schedule, and season outlook.