A-10 Xavier vs. Big East Xavier
Reading through another thread, a comment from one of the posters caught my attention. He said that he would have loved having Tandy in our A-10 days but less so now that we're in the Big East as we're trying to compete at a different level. That got me thinking: generally speaking, I don't think of Xavier's A-10 squads are being significant different than Xavier's Big East squads. Maybe the highs have been a bit higher (and the A-10 lows were somewhat lower), but overall my hypothesis is that while Xavier' opponents have obviously gotten significantly better, Xavier itself is of pretty comparable quality to what we were in the A-10 days. And that's not an insult to Big East Xavier at all, as A-10 Xavier was really good.
So I've set out to test this hypothesis. As I'm typing this, I'm not sure how it's going to turn out. But I'm going to compare the eras using Jeff Sagarin's final rankings (and the current rankings for this year's team). Sagarin's rankings only go back to 2000, so we'll miss a couple of A-10 years, but those years were mixed enough ('96 and '99 bad; '97 and '98 good) that they probably would have been essentially a wash. So here we go!
A-10 Xavier
2000: 60
2001: 34
2002: 20
2003: 17
2004: 20
2005: 94
2006: 61
2007: 41
2008: 11
2009: 19
2010: 11
2011: 43
2012: 48
2013: 77
Big East Xavier
2014: 53
2015: 22
2016: 13
2017: 29
2018: 13
2019: 58
2020: 48
2021: 47
Average A-10 rank: 39.7
Average Big East rank: 35.4
Turns out that it was pretty close. Despite the seeding, Sagarin actually thinks we hit our highest highs in the A-10 (twice). Based on the NCAA Tournament experience, it's hard to argue too much with that. The lower lows were clearly A-10.
Overall, it's quite remarkable how consistent the program has been. I think we probably all know that intuitively, but it's interesting (to me, at least) to see it written out over a 22 season period. We've been spoiled with some great basketball. There have been some three year rough patches as bad or worse than the current one, but some NCAA Tournament success (the near miss against Ohio State in 2007; the run to the Sweet 16 in 2012) softened the impact of those stretches. It's getting to be about time to get back to top 25 basketball, though, like we've had in 9 of the past 22 seasons.