2007-08 Game Recaps: 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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.