A role reversal doomed the No. 22 Xavier Musketeers in their only loss of the season, against Michigan at the Fort Myers Tip-Off on Wednesday.
Normally a team that avoids committing turnovers and pressures its opponent into making them, Xavier (6-1) will try to recapture its early-season winning form when it hosts South Carolina State on Sunday in Cincinnati.
Through their six wins, the Musketeers had just 58 turnovers while forcing 82 by their opponents.
But against the Wolverines, they lost the turnover battle 19-10 and the game 78-53. The Musketeers committed 14 turnovers in the first half and fell behind 41-30.
Xavier head coach Sean Miller credited his team for typically playing an up-tempo style while avoiding mistakes, while also acknowledging that the turnover bug really bit them against the Wolverines.
“We lost to a really good team; no shame in that,” Miller said. “We, on top of that, didn’t play well.”
“And that (avoiding turnovers) is something you (usually) do well? That’s going to be hard to overcome against a quality team like Michigan.”
Leading scorer Ryan Conwell (17.6 points per game) gave the Musketeers a boost with 19 points. Zach Freemantle, second on the team at 15.4 ppg, added 14 points and 10 rebounds.
Problematically, however, they also contributed to the turnover problem with three apiece.
“We didn’t play well enough to win the game,” Miller said. “The game got out of hand. It’s not like our guys quit. Their depth just continued to wear on us.”
The Musketeers also get 11 points and a team-high 4.4 assists per game from Dayvion McKnight. The guard had just one turnover against Michigan, but he also made just one of his eight shot attempts.
Xavier may have an opportunity get right in the turnover area against the Bulldogs (4-4), who are No. 207 in the NCAA in assist-to-turnover ratio at 1.11.
South Carolina State is fresh off an 82-53 road loss to Marshall on Wednesday, in a game in which turnovers weren’t a huge problem. But assists and made shots were hard to come by for the Bulldogs.
Leading scorer Drayton Jones (12.0 ppg) again paced his team in points with 10 vs. Marshall, but the Bulldogs as a team managed just six assists and shot terribly at the 3-point (18.8 percent) and the free-throw (47.1 percent) lines.
Jones is also the team’s leading rebounder with 5.1 a game, but no Bulldogs player is averaging more than two assists.
It’s all part of the learning process for coach Erik Martin, whose first team went 5-26 in 2022-23. The Bulldogs improved to 14-18 last season, including 9-5 in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.
“The only way you can grow sometimes is by failure or by struggling,” Martin said this offseason. “You have to fail in order to learn how to deal with failure and move on and become the person you’re supposed to be.”
–Field Level Media
