Xavier 68-77 Seton Hall: Too much of the same

At the end of Alvarez by Funeral for a Friend, Matthew Davies wistfully sings “You’re too much of a good thing, too much of a good thing.” You may be wondering what the pertinence of a song roughly the same age as All Wright has to this game. Well, the entire song is about the inability to leave something that hurts you. It was too much of the same, not good, thing that killed Xavier tonight.

Tre Carroll (0/0/0) took a charge tonight*. With 16:05 to play in the first half, the Big East’s leading scorer and Xavier’s hirsute talisman slid in front of 6-9, 235 Stephon Payne and gave his body up. If you’ve ever taken a charge from a college player with a head of steam, you’re aware it hurts. Tre is no slight lad himself, and all the expended energy from he and Payne went directly into his right hip when he hit the ground. He was up, then he wasn’t, then he was in the tunnel. He wouldn’t return.

Honestly, this game was probably over right then. Taking Tre out of this already bad offense is kind of like knocking the eyes out of a three-legged dog. Ultimately it probably doesn’t make much difference, but it just seems awfully mean. Much as you’d expect, Xavier struggled to find ways to score and within four minutes they were down seven.

But this is 2025-26 Xavier, and they didn’t know they were supposed to be beaten. Filip Borovicanin (15/7/7) led the charge, scoring 10 in the first half and dishing out three assists. He found Pape N’Diaye (10/6/0, three blocks) for a dunk and then a three. Then he found Anthony Robinson (2/0/0, two blocks) on another lob. The big Serbian was excellent in his particular Pterodactylish way, and somehow Xavier was still right with Seton Hall as the game went to the half.

There were warning signs, though. Roddie Anderson (6/4/2) did not follow our key to the game and stay hot. He was 2-9 in the first half and finished 2-10 from the floor and 1-3 from the line. Jovan Milicevic (9/1/1) was, and sit down for this one, limited by foul trouble. Xavier also coughed the ball up on 22.6% of those first half possessions.

And then in the second half it became too much of a not good thing. It didn’t start that way, though. For the first bit of the second half two of the worst offenses in the Big East put on an absolute clinic. In the first ten minutes the teams combined to score 55 points as no one could miss or get a stop. Xavier, especially, was torch hot for the first eight minutes, coming up empty on just two possessions. They could perhaps have run away and hid with that spurt, but they kept forgetting that AJ Staton-McCray existed and he buried three quick threes.

Still, when Malik Messina-Moore (12/5/3) sunk a jumper with 11:54 to play, Xavier led by four. Everything had been working to that point. N’Diaye had hit another three, Milicevic woke up and stopped hitting people, All Wright (10/2/5) had cashed out from deep, and Isaiah Walker (4/5/2) just kept outrunning the Pirates. At that point, with just under 12 to play, Xavier had a hand on seventh place and a chance to avoid UConn in the first round.

Then the wheels well and truly came off. Messina-Moore also got Xavier’s next four points. Unfortunately, it took him 8:34 to do so. Eight minutes and 34 seconds to make two shots. In that span Xavier missed 11 of 12 and watched as one of their patented droughts took them from leading the game to trailing. Seton Hall is so pitiful on offense that even that protracted stretch of scoring ineptitude only meant Xavier trailed by three when Triple M finished his six point burst over eight and a half minutes after it started, but Xavier wouldn’t score again until two All Wright free throws with 29 seconds to play.

You can do a lot of things and still win a basketball game. What you can’t do is go 11:25 and score only four points. That is a dry spell of Saharan proportions. That has been Xavier’s curse this season, but they cranked it to 11 for senior night. They fought and ran and hustled just like they always do, but they also did the other things they always do.

In the final bridge of the song Davies sings “and start this day all over and over again.” I wrote that against Georgetown Xavier played their hits and still came away with a win. Against Seton Hall the Groundhog Day nature of making the same mistakes and being bitten by the same problems couldn’t be overcome. It wasn’t too much of a good thing, but it was too much. Without a spinning, mouthguard chewing, point scoring, problem eraser to throw the ball to, Xavier succumbed to their weaknesses. In doing so they may have sounded the death knell for this season.

*This article is being written very late Tuesday night.