Xavier hates ‘mid-major’ label

Associated Press

CINCINNATI

Xavier bristles whenever anyone suggests it’s doing quite well for a mid-major school. Another trip to the NCAA’s round of 16 might finally remove the hyphen.

There’s no mid-anything about the Jesuit school, which is growing a reputation as a major player in college basketball.

The Musketeers (26-8) are in the NCAA tournament’s round of 16 for the third straight year. Only one other school — Michigan State — can match that. And the Musketeers’ pre-eminence has nothing to do with March surprises or tournament upsets.

They drew it up that way. They spend that way. They win that way.

“Everything in our program is first-class — how we travel, how we recruit, the use of charter planes, the Cintas Center, how we schedule,” coach Chris Mack said.

There’s a formula for winning in college basketball, one that applies to programs big and small. In the last decade, Xavier has gotten it right.

The Musketeers are making their ninth NCAA tournament appearance in 10 years and their fifth in a row, set to play Kansas State in the regional semifinals on Thursday in Salt Lake City. Only a dozen schools have made the NCAA tournament each of the last five years: Xavier, Duke, Kansas, Michigan State, Tennessee, Pittsburgh, Marquette, Gonzaga, Texas, Texas A&M, Villanova and Wisconsin.

The small university — 4,200 undergraduates — began emerging as a regular NCAA tournament team in the 1980s, when it played in a Midwestern Collegiate Conference that was the definition of mid-major. As the acclaim grew, the school’s administration decided the basketball program could raise its profile and give it a face across the country.

It wasn’t going to be easy or cheap to become one of the best.

“The formula is simple,” athletics director Mike Bobinski said. “Being successful isn’t all that simple. If it was that easy, there would be more than just a couple of teams advancing deep in the tournament every year.”

Xavier moved up to the Atlantic 10, which had some of the nation’s top teams in Temple and Massachusetts, for the 2005-06 season. Five years later, it opened the state-of-the-art Cintas Center on campus, which became a springboard to much bigger things.

“If you want to be successful at a high level, your investment and commitment need to be at a high level,” Bobinski said. “You can’t have one without the other.”