Here\u2019s the news as it dropped yesterday (now two days ago):<\/p>\n
Xavier joins a trio of other high majors in the Palmetto Bracket, tipping off in the last game of the day on Friday before finishing up at either 1 PM in the title game or 3:30 PM in the 3rd place game on Sunday. As things stand now, Georgia looks to be the favorite by virtue of returning almost a third of their minutes from last season, highlighted by guard Blue Cain, and forwards Dylan James and Justin Abson to go with the 33rd ranked transfer haul according to 24\/7 Sports. West Virginia finds themselves in a similar position to Xavier with their outgoing coach having disgraced himself by bag chasing to Indiana and an entirely new roster assembled by incoming coach Ross Hodge highlighted by North Dakota star Treysen Eaglestaff and the 35th ranked transfer class as well as 4-star freshman and former Xavier commit Jayden Forsythe. Clemson finds themselves somewhere in the middle of those two, in that they don\u2019t return as much as UGA but Dillon Hunter is back and was a key contributor on last year\u2019s 5 seed, although he was injured for their upset at the hands of McNeese. The Tigers have the top ranked transfer haul in the field, clocking in at 30th, and also feature a pair of 4-star freshmen in Ace Buckner and Dallas Thomas.<\/p>\n
With Iowa on the schedule one week before they head to Charleston, these will not be their first tests against high major competition, but seeing how they handle a Georgia team that has aspirations of building on last year\u2019s first round exit and whichever of Clemson and WVU\u2019s new look lineups they face after that will be a helpful barometer as to where Richard Pitino and his new look Musketeers will fall in the Big East pecking order come January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s the news as it dropped yesterday (now two days ago): Xavier joins a trio of other high…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[57901,402,398,400,401,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-83036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-2025-season-preview","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-ncaa","11":"tag-ncaa-basketball","12":"tag-ncaabasketball","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}