Not from Francis besides his 8 or so
You seem to put way more stock than I do in garbage time points scored by others against better teams (guys coming in and hitting some shots in the second half of a game we’re losing by nearly 30 points) (I see this as meaningless, low pressure situations almost like a practice environment). I’ll never understand why anyone would put more stock in this than performance level in any close game - regardless of opponent. We just have to agree to disagree on this point. Grant, for example, seems to get way more garbage time run than anyone else on the team. His points against high majors have almost entirely come this way. He’s been a complete non factor in most of those games (I.e. his performance against better opponents has dropped just as much as Francis but the focus is only francis).
That said, taking your position above as a given, it must then, in fairness, be acknowledged that Tariq played less on average in those games than he did in the other games (since the bench was unloaded). For example, he had 9+ points in Michigan, ND and Tenn logging only 19, 22 and 25 minutes which would put him fairly close to his per minute scoring rate in those games if he had played 28 or so minutes.
So really - your conclusion that he won’t or couldn’t score much in conference play is based on 2 games - one of which I blame almost entirely on Pike and the situation he put Tariq in to open that game. SHU’s upgraded defense didn’t make an 84% FT shooter go 1-4 from the line.. Tariq wasn’t going to have a good offensive game after that start - who the opponent was had nothing to do with it.
Again - this is entirely relative to the other options available and nothing more. We beat a depleted Penn team by one. We’re not likely to be competitive in many games if this continues and Pike may well choose to play 13 guys in blow out losses - so then, yeah - if Tariq only plays 19 or so min he’ll prob only give us 8 in that case as you said. But not because he wouldn’t score more if he played traditional starter minutes. He would and it’s still probably the case that playing him, on average, gives us a better chance of winning than many of the others. Although that chance is low no matter who we go with.