The 36-year-old Steele has never been a head coach (Neither had Chris Mack, when he was promoted to replace Sean Miller in the school's last coaching change) , but by being an assistant, Steele has the advantage of keeping many things the same, the most important of which is hopefully being able to keep committed recruits.
This is always a factor when a coach departs and Xavier lost one recruit already when 2018-19 graduate transfer Evan Boudreaux de-committed when Mack announced his move to Louisville.
Boudreaux signed with Purdue, but with many of Steele's duties as an assistant being recruiting related, I would think that Steele should be able to retain most if not all of the incoming recruiting class.
Much of Xavier's sustained success has occurred by keeping their coaches in-house as they have promoted assistants (Sean Miller and Chris Mack) and brought back former assistants that took lesser jobs as head coaches (Skip Prosser) over the last 25 years.
Only the hiring of Thad Matta from Butler (With both of those schools now in the Big East, you'd never see that move happen today) to replace Prosser (Wake Forest) breaks a perfect run of coaches that had some sort of prior experience at Xavier.
It always comes with some risk when you move up a popular assistant to be the head man, especially when it is a person without prior head coaching experience, but in a case such as this one that did not have a breakout candidate from the "hot coach", it made sense to stick with Travis Steele and attempt to retain some sort of continuity in the program.
Chris Mack had made no secret that if Xavier did not give the job to Steele, Steele would be joining him in Louisville and it truly would be an entire revamp of the basketball program at a time when Xavier has enjoyed its highest level of success.
At the same time, it would be a shame to lose the momentum that the program has built since joining the Big East and playing it safe is the best thing to do...
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