For starters, Ball State is a Q4 game no matter where or when you play it. The Cardinals can get hot and hurt teams, but Xavier should dispatch them and will pay dearly come March if they don’t.
The days of UC being the best game on Xavier’s non-conference schedule are long gone. For starters, Mario Mercurio now makes sure that the Musketeers get plenty of opportunities to win big games before conference play starts. It was Mercurio’s study of how to game the RPI that got Xavier ahead of the curve before that terrible metric was retired.