Xavier Mens Basketball Team Has Been Carrying An Ash Filled Jar Containing The Month Of February To Remind Them Of When They Sucked
ORLANDO, Fla. – A jar filled with ashes is an unnerving sight, especially when it’s in the corner of a locker room.
But it’s not as morose as it sounds. The ashes in Xavier‘s locker room represent the Musketeers’ month of February.
On Feb. 28, Xavier was in the midst of a five-game losing streak. The Musketeers had just lost a tough game at home to Butler in which they turned it over four times in a two-minute span late in the second half. After starting point guard Edmond Sumner was lost for the season because of a torn ACL, Xavier was just 3-5 for the month.
The Musketeers needed a spark, something to change the momentum.
“We sat in one of those infamous staff meetings and tried to figure out how to turn the page,” coach Chris Mack said.
And so assistant coach Mike Pegues threw out the idea of burning a calendar. Putting the entire month of February in the past.
Mack wanted to take it a step further. “Let’s not just burn it. Let’s keep the ashes, buy an urn,” Mack told his staff.
The coaches went onto Walmart’s website looking for urns, something none of them had ever done. They sent graduate assistant Allen Payne out to the store to pick one up, but the one they wanted wasn’t available anymore. So they settled on a jar that wasn’t technically an urn, but it was glass, and you can see inside of it. It would suffice.
Mack called the players in for a meeting before practice that day, emphasizing the difficult schedule they just navigated through during the losing streak. He told them they were still an NCAA tournament team, with most bracketologists having them in the No. 8- or 9-seed range. Then he showed the players a video set to “One Shining Moment,” a collection of all of the best Xavier moments in the NCAA tournament over the years.
“That’s why you guys came here,” he told his players.
Mario Mercurio, the team’s director of basketball administration, made a calendar of the month of February for every player. It was a stock card with the games, the scores — and showed how three of the losses came back-to-back-to-back to bubble teams (Providence, Marquette and Seton Hall) on the road.
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File this under things I would have liked to know before I placed any bets on March Madness. What a fucking football guy move this. Burning a calendar and then carrying the ashes around in an urn everywhere you go is exactly how you turn a team around. Screw practicing harder, or watching tape, or tweaking the lineup, you need something tangible, something everyone can understand. And burning the month of February then carrying around the ashes is exactly that. Like when Tony Sporano buried that football in Oakland. Or when Hugh Freeze faked his own funeral. Death motivates. Death of inanimate objects motivates times a million. Xavier +8,500 to win the whole damn thing. Just saying, an urn full of calendar ashes has never lost an NCAA Tournament, that’s a simple fact no one can argue with.
PS
Seriously one of my favorite pictures of all time. Alright guys, we’re going to bury this football and put it all in the past, then I’m going to have our running back take every snap and pretend to pass but never actually pass, it’s gonna be great.
