Xavier’s Summer Shake-Up: What’s Brewing Behind the Scenes for Big East Basketball?

Sophomores! Going in order of who seems to have had the biggest impact on their freshman year squad:

NET: #45
KenPom.com: #43
BartTorvik.com: #40
Team: Xavier Musketeers
Obviously, way more questions than answers for Xavier at this point of the calendar.
Tre Carroll (6’8”, 235 lb. forward) had a breakout junior year, leading to 14 starts for FAU this past season. He ended up averaging 1.2 points, 5.2 rebounds, 1.6 assists, and a block per game. Can he shoot 39% on threes again like he did last year, which was a huge jump up from his first two seasons? Filip Borovicanin (6’9”, 222 lb. forward) also broke out as a junior at his previous school, assisted by a transfer from Arizona to New Mexico. I know that 5.9 points and 4.6 rebounds a game doesn’t sound like a breakout, but it was for him. You might remember him from his 8 point, 5 rebound game in the NCAA tournament against Marquette, where he was one of two Lobos to connect on a three-point in the entire 40 minutes.
Two of the seniors were starters at their last stops. Malik Messina-Moore (6’4”, 200 lb. guard) went from mostly starting as a sophomore at Pepperdine to starting every game of junior year at Montana. He put up 12.6 points, 3.2 rebounds, and 2.4 assists for the Grizzlies, and he provides an obvious shooting threat at 41% last season with over five attempts per game. Isaiah Walker (6’5”, 205 lb. guard) spent the last three years at Belmont, going through your traditional college development: Guy to Rotation Guy to Starter. He chipped in 10.8 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 2.2 assists a game last year, but he’s under 33% on triples in his career.
Final Computer Rankings
2024-25 Record: 22-12, 13-7 Big East
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Key Additions: Xavier has four transfers listed as seniors on their roster, one listed as a junior, and six listed as sophomores, plus a seven foot tall freshman that doesn’t even have a 247 Sports page. We’re talking about guys we expect to make an impact this season, so we will be skipping over the mystery freshman big and the sophomore who played one minute for UNLV last year. That still leaves us 10 transfers to run through, so let’s go in order of eligibility remaining, starting with the guys who are only in Cincinnati for one season.
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Are Xavier fans pleased with how this all shook out? Are they pissed at Sean Miller for bailing on them a second time? Are they pissed at Sean Miller for telegraphing that he was not planning on staying in the Queen City any longer than he had to with last year’s roster construction? Does their level of frustration with Miller affect how the their expectations for next season with his replacement? Are they happy with Richard Pitino — clearly the second best Pitino now coaching in the Big East — as the replacement? Is “one winning Big Ten campaign in eight seasons” the kind of guy you want running the show for the Musketeers? Is “got outworked and then publicly shamed for it by Steve Wojciechowski when it came to recruiting Dawson Garcia” the kind of head coach that gets you fired up on game day?
No, really. Xavier loses everyone who played more than three minutes for them last season.
The Xavier Musketeers wrapped up the 2024-25 season with a respectable 22-12 record, carving out a solid 13-7 mark within the competitive Big East. They found themselves tied for fourth place alongside Marquette, nudging ahead thanks to a tiebreaker against Connecticut. Despite a gritty seven-game winning streak to close the regular season, their postseason hopes were dashed with a narrow two-point loss in the Big East quarterfinals. Still, Xavier snagged an #11 seed sweet enough for a First Four victory over Texas before bowing out to Illinois. Yet, the real story isn’t just the numbers or finishes — it’s the seismic shift off the court. The Musketeers face a near-total roster reset, losing every key player, including their head coach Sean Miller, who has moved on to Texas. With no returners carrying significant minutes, and a roster now crowded with transfers and newcomers under fresh leadership from Richard Pitino, the upcoming season feels like stepping into uncharted waters. How this mosaic of fresh faces and a new coaching philosophy will gel — and how the Xavier faithful will react — remains one of the most intriguing narratives as the program begins what could be a bold, if uncertain, new chapter. LEARN MORE
How much Year One Forgiveness are Xavier fans willing to extend to Pitino as he has to kind of completely start the development side of the program over from scratch with all of these transfers? What happens next year when Pitino has four roster spots coming open because the One Year Only transfers are done?
Pape N’Diaye (7’0”, 230 lb. forward) was at UNLV last season, playing in 32 games but averaging just over 13 minutes a night. The notable thing? 1.1 blocks per game, which works out to a rate of 10.2% per KenPom.com, and if he had the minutes to qualify, that would have been top 20 in the country last year.
Outlook: With Xavier having literally five minutes of returning contributions from last season, I think we can dispense with even a vague attempt at trying to figure out what we can expect from the Musketeers. I will point out that BartTorvik.com currently projects the Musketeers at #65 in the country — aka Not A Tournament Team — after you adjust for the fact that Trey Green is at Saint Louis now and not in southwestern Ohio. Does that mean anything at all to anyone, given that Xavier’s players and coaches are wearing nametags at summer workouts so everyone learns everyone’s names? Maybe, maybe not.
2024-25 Big East Finish: Tied for fourth with Marquette, but won the tiebreaker by way of a 1-1 record against Connecticut.
As we discussed last summer, most of the guys that they lost were on their final year of eligibility anyway, so losing Marcus Foster, leading scorer and rebounder Zach Freemantle, Jerome Hunter, Dante Maddox, and assists leader Dayvion McKnight wasn’t a surprise to anyone. The Musketeers do lose a couple of notable contributors to the transfer portal, most likely because of the coaching change. Ryan Conwell takes his 16.5 points per game and 41% three-point shooting over to Louisville for his final year of eligibility, while John Hugley IV heads off to Duquesne for his last year.
Postseason? Winning their last seven regular season games before falling by two points to Marquette in the Big East quarterfinals was enough to squeeze Xavier into the NCAA tournament as a #11 seed. That sent the Musketeers to Dayton for the First Four, where they beat Texas to advance to the round of 64 before losing, 86-73, to Illinois.
The lone junior making the move to Xavier is Mier Panoam (6’2”, 200 lb. guard) who is on his third team in three years after starting off at Tulane and then moving on to North Dakota. BY THE WAY: He lists Anchorage, Alaska as his home town, but his bio says he at least finished high school in Norcross, Georgia. Atlanta suburbs-New Orleans-eastern North Dakota-Cincinnati is an incredible living experience/journey for the past four years, much less whatever he did between Alaska and Norcross. Anyway, he started all 33 appearances last year for the Fighting Hawks, and averaged 13.0 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 2.4 assists per game.
Coach: Richard Pitino, entering his first season as head coach at Xavier and 14th as a Division 1 head coach. He recently completed a four year stint at New Mexico — bringing Borovicanin and Milicevic with him — where he posted an overall record of 88-49 and went to the NCAA tournament in each of the last two seasons. Pitino has a record of 247-186 as a Division 1 head coach after stops at FIU and Minnesota as well.
All Wright — no, seriously, that’s the 6’3”, 190 lb. guard’s name — started 31 of 34 appearances for Valparaiso this past year, barely missing out on the team’s top spots in scoring (15.5/game) and assists (2.4/game). He was a 38% shooter for his first year in D1, so that’s a good sign going forward. Gabriel Pozzato (6’7”, 200 lb. forward) wasn’t too far behind Wright in terms of impact, arguably doing more for Evansville than Wright did for the Beacons. Pozzato started in all 24 of his appearances, missing eight games in the middle of the year, and he ended up averaging 14.9 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 1.3 steals per game while playing 35 minutes a night. He did shoot way too many threes, hitting less than 32% while trying nearly six per contest.
It’s kind of a tie between Jovan Milicevic (6’10”, 241 lb. forward) and Anthony Robinson (6’10”, 252 lb. forward/center) to round out the category, as both guys would be right on the fringe of Notable Returning Guy if they were coming back from last season. Robinson was under 10 minutes per game but played in 26 contests for Virginia last year, while Milicevic ended up averaging 11.8 in his 34 appearances for New Mexico. I’d say we could chalk both guys up to “let’s see how much a fresh start does for both of them,” but Milicevic is following his coach to Xavier. Speaking of that guy…..
Key Returners: No one.
However, it’s not Sean Miller in charge any more. In last year’s team preview/vibe check, I noted that last year’s roster looked an awful lot like a roster that Sean Miller wasn’t planning on coaching going past April 2025. As it turns out, I was extremely right. Xavier went from beating Texas in the First Four on March 19th to losing to Illinois on March 21st to seeing Sean Miller announced as the new Texas head coach on March 24th (one day after the job opened!) to announcing Richard Pitino as the new head coach on March 25th.
Last September, I pointed out that Xavier was going into the year with eight guys who had no eligibility remaining after 2024-25 as well as zero freshmen. One way or another, this jumbled mess of transfers who don’t know each other is what Xavier was going to look like this coming season no matter who was in charge of the thing.
As far as guys who know which direction is north when they’re standing in the practice gym, Xavier returns three walk ons and Roddie Anderson (6’3”, 190 lb. guard), a Boise State transfer that redshirted last season. I’m guessing that the combination of “wasn’t blowing them away as a Bronco” and “didn’t play at all in 2024-25” led Anderson to try his luck with the new coaching staff in Cincinnati instead of finding a new home for a fourth straight season.
Key Departures: Everyone, including head coach Sean Miller, who is now the head coach at Texas.

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What I am most curious about for Xavier in 2025-26 is the mindset of the Musketeer faithful. I am curious about how they are approaching this coming season given everything that happened in the last 12 months.
There are also two guys who bopped off to Texas to follow Miller. One is Dailyn Swain, who was #3 on the roster in scoring last year at 11.0 points per game, and he added 5.5 rebounds and 2.6 assists, too. The other departure actually isn’t a key loss from last year’s roster, as it’s Lassina Traore, who suffered a preseason injury in what was supposed to be his final year of college hoops. He elected to trust Miller for his last year one more time.