December 2007 Archives

I came back a day early from my Christmas vacation for this? Crime in Italy, I can't ever remember sitting in person and watching a Creighton game that was such a mismatch. And that's not an exaggeration, nor is it hyperbole: the last double-digit home loss for the Jays came in 1996...a year before I came to Omaha for my freshman year at CU. So I literally hadn't witnessed such a loss in person.

Not that this fact makes me feel any better, mind you. There's not much to say about this game, other than this: the Jays got their butts summarily handed to them on the Valley Game Of The Week, had their weaknesses exposed, and were thoroughly embarrassed.

Maybe I should have seen this coming, considering my Christmas vacation began by sitting at the Metrodome "cheering" the Vikings as they got embarrassed on national television last Sunday night.

When you play teams from the bottom rung of D1 at home, you can generally assume victory is imminent. What becomes more important, then, is working on things and improving for games against tougher opponents down the line. In that respect, did Creighton succeed in their two-game sojourn into the valley of suckitude?

I have to be honest with you, I don't think so. Their defense was shoddy on Monday night in allowing 73 points to Houston Baptist, and while they only allowed 54 last night, they were every bit as porous. Time after time, players were out of position in their defensive rotations, and the result was easy baskets. This was a 10-point game for a good chunk of the night, and the reason was defense (or lack thereof). There's no reason this game should have been that close, especially when you're scoring 40 points in a half. Sorry to be a downer, but its true.

But there they were, with a 40-30 lead at the break. To be fair, this is a young team, and painted in broad strokes young players are usually better offensively than defensively. They'll get better. Just not this week.

I have to be brutally honest with you here. Tonight's game, the second consecutive against a first-year D1 team, does not excite me. In fact, I don't mind tellin' ya I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out a way to properly preview the carnage our eyeballs will endure upon viewing this game. Here's what I came up with:

A few years ago, I went to a graphic design conference in Austin, Texas and a couple of nights before I left, I bought an eight-piece chicken pack from Wal-Mart. I ate half of it, and put the rest in the fridge for later. When I left for Texas, it was still in there, and during the six days I was gone, the power went out in my apartment. When it came back on, the ensuing power surge fried something electrical in the fridge, causing it not to come back on. Everything in the fridge spoled, but the most offensive odor was that chicken.

When I returned to Omaha, I smelled something offensive in the hallway. Assuming it was my neighbors again, I hurried into my unit because it was really bad -- if Andrew Dice Clay was a stench, it would have smelled a lot like that. Because, you know, it started out OK, even mildly amusing for a moment, and then all of a sudden, its hurt just to be around it. Shut up, this analogy will work.

In college hoops, scoring 100 points in a game doesn't happen very often. Perhaps once or twice a season even for good teams. If you figure that the game lasts 40 minutes, to score 100 points means you have to get a least one basket per minute, and mix in a few times where you score twice in a minute. Even that will barely get you over the century mark. In my ten years in Omaha watching Creighton play, I've personally seen them accomplish the feat just three times.

To put it further in perspective, if Creighton scores 75 points in a game, season ticket holders get free Godfather's Pizza with their ticket stub. The threshhold is set at 75 because that's a pretty good median -- they'll have about half their games over 75, and some under 75. When they do get over 75, it usually happens late in the game. Saturday, Creighton passed 75 at the 13:33 mark of the second half. Seriously.

As such, its a curious phenomenon when a team gets close to 100. Since usually a game where someone gets to 100 is a blow-out, the fans have more than likely been out of the game since roughly the under-16 timeout. But if the team gets to 90 with a few minutes left, voila! the fans are back. Suddenly, there is a heightened sense of anticipation. No one leaves. Fans yell for players to shoot threes. If the opposing team stalls to prevent your team from getting the ball back with a chance at 100, they get booed mercilessly. In a 40 point rout.

Humans are strange creatures sometimes, aren't we?

That's generally the way it works. The other way of scoring 100 points is to simply blow right past it and keep on truckin', and that's the method Creighton employed Monday night. They had 101 points going into the under-four timeout! And the end of the bench kept it going with nine more points to make an even 110.

Good stuff.

School Databank:

Location: Houston, TX

Enrollment: 1,992

Famous sports alumni: None so far

Last game: Lost to SMU 90-79

Last game vs Creighton: Jays won 73-72 on 12/14/1981

Series: First ever meeting

Note: This is Houston Baptist's first year in Division 1

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the three-game non-conference swing Creighton was about to embark on was one of the toughest in recent memory. Well, on Monday Creighton begins one of the weakest three-game stretches of non-conference opponents in recent memory. Talk about a roller coaster.

I've wanted to see St. Joseph's on the Jays' schedule for a long time. A similarly-sized Jesuit school from Philadelphia, they remind me of Creighton in some respects. On the basketball court, they're one of the best-coached, hardest-working teams in the Atlantic 10...a league that itself reminds me of the MVC. From watching St. Joe's on TV, you could tell they were well-coached.

And sure enough, one of the most enjoyable things about yesterday's battle was watching two great teachers coach their teams. Non-conference teams coming into Omaha, their coach getting schooled by Dana Altman, and the resulting message board posts lamenting the fact that their coaches' faults were exposed by a better coach...these things are so predictable, its almost a cliche at this point. It happens three or four times a year!

But from the outset, it was clear Phil Martelli was a brilliant teacher in his own right. Falling behind big early after his defense was Hibmatized (two Pierce Hibma three pointers in a span of 25 seconds, just two minutes into the game), he calmly called timeout to keep his team in the game. His team came out, hit shots, and kept the game close. And during those timeouts, he spent his time actually teaching his players, instead of whining to the officials (which he certainly would have had every right to do, given the uneven job the refs did). Not to name names, but some coaches who've brought teams into Omaha spend more time whining than they do coaching their players to perform better.

School Databank:

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Enrollment: 4,250

Famous sports alumni: Matt Guokas (NBA), Jim O'Brien (NBA Coach), Dr. Jack Ramsay (NBA Coach, ESPN Analyst), Jameer Nelson (NBA), Delonte West (NBA)

Last game: Lost to Holy Cross 71-66

Last game vs Creighton: Jays won 73-72 on 12/14/1981

Series: St. Joe's leads 4-1

The second Philadelphia school on the Jays schedule comes to town on Sunday, Phil Martelli's St. Josephs's Hawks of the Atlantic 10. The last time these teams met, Creighton won by one point in a game at the Civic Auditorium...in December of 1981. That game was payback for St. Joe's eliminating Creighton from the NCAA Tournament eight months prior, 59-57. It also stands as the only time Creighton has won a game in the series. For the record, I was three years old when this happened. This is what you call "research", because I don't exactly remember those games first-hand...

One of the interesting things about St. Joe's, to me, is the fact that they bring their mascot to every game, no matter where its played. "The Hawk Will Never Die" is the chant, and the mascot flaps its wings non-stop for the entirety of the game -- as ESPN calculated in a 2003 game, this can be as many as 3500 flaps per game! At home games, it flies in figure eights during timeouts on the court to the delight of the crowd; I would imagine he will refrain from such shenanigans in Omaha, lest Billy take him down a notch. But this is fascinating to me. At a road game where perhaps 500, or at the most 1000 Hawks fans will be in attendance, the mascot will stand there flapping its wings non-stop all afternoon? It has for 50 years, so obviously the answer to my question is a resounding "yes", but still. Man, that's something I have to see to believe.

School Databank:

Location: Cincinnati, OH

Enrollment: 4,000

Famous sports alumni: Tyrone Hill, Brian Grant, Byron Larkin, David West

Last game: Defeated Belmont 90-49

Last game vs Creighton: Lost 73-67 in Omaha on 12/9/06

Series: Xavier leads 7-6

The fourteenth all-time meeting between these two Jesuit rivals takes place tonight in Cincinnati, as #21 Xavier takes on the Jays at the Cintas Center. The last seven games in the series have been decided by a sum total of 22 points, making the series not just a marquee matchup for the fans to look forward to but an entertaining and competitive one as well.

Its with a heavy heart that I sit down to write this tonight. The Jays lost a game on Wednesday night, but Omaha lost something much more important. Eight families lost loved ones, and countless others were injured either physically or mentally, when a dude walked into a mall and started shooting people. Think about that, a guy -- a kid, really, he was just 19 -- walks into a mall with a SKS assault rifle and starts picking people off left and right. Does that even make any sense? If you live to be 150 years old will that ever make any freaking sense? I'm at a loss to describe how I feel, honestly, because I was at Westroads over my lunch hour today, and left about 45 minutes before this all happened. What if I'd taken a late lunch, as I often do? Sheesh, I scarcely dare give it utterance.

I offer my sincerest condolences to everyone who suffered a loss today, and I want you to know you're all in my prayers.

Now then, I don't know about you, but I could use a distraction from all this heavy real-world stuff. Shall we talk some hoops?

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Wednesday morning, I got an email from a co-worker of mine who recently moved here from Cincinnati. He's a University of Cincinnati alum and can't stand Xavier. I mean, he can't STAND 'em. But now that he lives here in Omaha, he feels like he has to keep it real for his hometown, I guess, hence the smack talk. He was convinced they would beat Creighton, and he wanted to tell me all about it.

"You'd better hope your boys don't try run their press. Prince will run right through 'em, and they'll beat you by 20, guaranteed!"

Creighton and Xavier have played an extraordinarily close series over the years, with Xavier holding a 7-6 edge. Look at some of these scores:

1938: Creighton 34, Xavier 29

1941: Creighton 42, Xavier 39

1960: Xavier 75, Creighton 73

1985: Xavier 56, Creighton 53

1986: Creighton 74, Xavier 73

2001: Xavier 72, Creighton 65

2002: Xavier 75, Creighton 73

2004: Creighton 73, Xavier 72

2005: Creighton 61, Xavier 59

2006: Creighton 73, Xavier 67

That's a whole lot of great games, isn't it? But the best might very well have taken place on New Years Eve 2002, when #15 Creighton travelled to Cincinnati to take on #19 Xavier. Seniors Kyle Korver and David West elevated their game to ridiculous levels, in an epic battle of All-Americans that came down to a last second shot in a tie game. With the two teams resuming their series tomorrow night, I thought I would take a look back at that game.

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Creighton came into the New Years Eve tilt riding the wave of their best start in 60 years, and entered the game 10-0 and ranked 15th in the country. Meanwhile, Xavier entered the game as a team in turmoil. Sure, they had beaten Eastern Kentucky 84-60 three days prior, and sure, they were ranked in the Top 20. But after that game their best player and All-American candidate, David West, called the team out. He told the media that some of his teammates were playing selfishly, and that they would get "whipped by Creighton" if it didn't start pulling together.

The DAC was every bit as hostile as I expected it would be. As fans entered the arena, they were offered a chance to take a sledgehammer to an old busted Yugo with "CREIGHTON" painted on the side of it. Nice. And once inside the arena, a sign hung prominently from a section across from the CU bench read, "Where'd y'all park yer Trakters?" I saw that one on the TV broadcast and just about spit out my Bud Light. I don't know what's funnier, the thought of a bunch of CU fans driving tractors (oop, sorry, TRAKTERS) across the country and into downtown Philadelphia, or that the owner of the sign didn't know how to spell tractors...

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The first road game of the year is the first time you can really gauge a team, and in that respect, it would be awfully tempting to paint Creighton's 24-point win in broad strokes and say it was a resounding success. And in a lot of respects, it was. Their press forced Drexel into 29 turnovers (18 in the first half!), their stifling defense held Drexel to just 40% shooting, and they made 20 of 23 free throws.

That's all good stuff, isn't it? You bet it is. There was also 16 Creighton turnovers, 18 fouls, 4-24 shooting from behind the arc, and an almost uncanny ability to keep Drexel in the game with inopportune mistakes. In other words, if they didn't do all of those things, they could have won this game by 40 points.

School Databank:

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Enrollment: 12,906

Famous sports alumni: Malik Rose (NBA), Bob Alejnikov (NBA)

Last game: Lost to George Mason 85-38

Last game vs Creighton: Won 64-58 on 2/17/07

Series: Drexel leads 1-0

One of the toughest stretches of non-conference basketball in recent memory begins today for the Jays, as they travel to Philadelphia to take on the Drexel Dragons in the Jays' first trip to Pennsylvania since a 1973 tilt with Duquesne. Afterward, its on to Cincinnati to take on Xavier, before playing St. Joseph's next Sunday back in Omaha.

I'm excited to see this game, because its the first chance to see Creighton's newcomers outside of the friendly confines of the Qwest Center. And as far as tough venues to play your first college road game in, it doesn't get much tougher than the Daskalakis Athletic Center (DAC for short). The 2300-seat arena may be small, but its size actually works to its advantage, as it is loud and the close proximity of the fans to the court make it an intimidating atmosphere. Not exactly the type of place you'd prefer to take a team with just three returning letterman from a year ago, and certainly not for their first road game. Yet this is the hand they're dealt, so the outcome should be very interesting.