2007-08 Game Recaps: January 2008 Archives

In my Gameday preview, I openly wondered what the crowd would look like in Des Moines. Would it be 30-40% Creighton fans, as it has been in recent years, or would it be representative of a Top 20 team? Well, it was most certainly the latter. In fact, I'd peg the Jays' percentage at somewhere around 5%. That place was a zoo, and it was almost entirely pro-Drake. Good for them.

I am pissed that I didn't get my free "Unleashed!" t-shirt. Because I totally don't have enough t-shirts. Actually, I'm about 18 shirts beyond the point where I needed a bigger dresser to house them, but still. I wanted my free t-shirt!

Our seats were awfully nice, courtesy of my college roommate who used some connections within the Drake athletic department to score us complimentary seats at midcourt. Upside to that is you have great seats. Downside is...there is no downside. You bet.

Did I mention I want my damn free t-shirt? Frankly, its not too late. Feel free to drop one in the mail to me.

I always get a flu shot. Well, not always, but at least going back to when I was a student at Creighton, I've got flu shots every fall. And I've not had the flu once during that span. This year, the flu shot caravan came to my office while I was on vacation in Denver, and I just never got around to getting one on my own.

So it only stands to reason that I would then contract the flu virus on the weekend of the Southern Illinois game, a game preceded by College Gameday and broadcast in HD by ESPN's "Saturday Night Primetime" crew. Of all the weekends to come down with a temporarily debilitating virus, it had to be THIS one. I had planned all sorts of pre-game Gameday previews, a live-blog of College Gameday, and I had even figured on keeping a notepad beside me during the telecast to keep track of the number of times ESPN's crew made me upset with their ignorance or arrogance. Alas, none of this came to pass.

Drake brought their cheerleaders and their mascot, Spike, with them to the game, and they roamed the court in front of my section. At times they blocked my view, and at times it was annoying when Spike walked up the aisle to talk smack. But it was kinda cool to have them there, if only because it made the game seem like a bigger event.

My dad, the Drake alum, used their presence as an excuse to exhibit carte blanche in cheering for the Bulldogs. I explained to him that such behavior was not cool in the lower bowl, and told him the tragic story the night his other son was banished to the upper bowl because of his obnoxious cheering for Northern Iowa. I didn't demand he cheer for Creighton, I just asked him to behave himself. Polite clapping is fine. Yelling is not. Telling me things like "If this gets into a free-throw contest, there's going to be a lot of sad people in this building." is not cool.

I reconcile his presence with the fact that he's come to every Drake-CU game in Omaha with me for going on 10 years, and that Creighton has won almost all of them. That and the fact that all of the food and beer was on his tab. Buy me free beer and food and you can pretty much cheer for anyone you want to.

The biggest reason for optimism Saturday night comes from this stat: on a night when Dane Watts and P'Allen Stinnett, the Jays' two most reliable scorers, attempted just 10 shots, the team scored 86 points. Those two combined for just 13 points. Further, Chad Millard, who has at times been able to score in bunches, spent the night hooked up to an IV in the locker room with the flu.

So how did the Jays score 86 points with that being the case? Cavel Witter and Booker Woodfox, their two JuCo transfers, combined for 41 points on 11-14 shooting. Woodfox, in particular, shot lights out. Both of them had one amazing stat apiece. Ready for it?

Woodfox shot 6-7 from behind the arc. Witter shot 11-13 from the line.

If you think those stats are unrelated, you weren't watching close enough. Woodfox was absolutely on fire from outside, and as the game went on, Indiana State had to devote defensive resources to stopping him from catching the ball. When they did that, Witter used dribble penetration to get into the paint and draw fouls. And when he got to the line, he made the free throws. It had to be a frustrating one-two punch for Kevin McKenna and the Sycamores to deal with.

Remember two weeks ago when all those Debbie Downer Jays fans flooded the Bluejay Cafe and talk radio with their Armageddon talk? The Jays had lost two particularly ugly games, falling to 0-2 in the league for the first time since the Rick Johnson era. Well, don't look now, but the Jays have won four straight, three of them on the road, and now sit at 4-2 in the league, 13-3 overall.

Remember two weeks ago when an interview with Dana Altman on a local radio station led a sports talk host to speculate that if a certain Freshman didn't stop whining to the refs and didn't start buying into the Creighton system, he might transfer? Again, don't look now, but that same Freshman has since gone on to be the MVC Newcomer Of The Week in BOTH weeks since that erroneous speculation, has earned a starting spot at guard, and made clutch plays down the stretch in two consecutive road wins.

Tuesday night, a national TV audience (or at least, the 1% of the U.S. not watching American Idol or Ohio State-Michigan) got a chance to see this new crop of Jays first-hand. And they saw a pretty good representation of what this team's made of.

Saturday night, I was on a birthday party bus and after failing in my attempt to get the bartender at the first bar to turn the CU game on, was finally able to get the game at bar #2. Seriously, I know its the NFL playoffs, but would it kill you to turn ONE of your 57 televisions to the Jays game? One? Anyway, once that sales pitch was successful, the next pitch was to convince everyone to stay at that bar until the game ended.

My solution was to offer to buy beer for the person in charge of making such decisions as long as we stayed at that bar. Not a cheap solution, but a solution nonetheless! You bet.

Random observations from the game (because I haven't done a post-game random thought post in a long time!):

I'm extraordinarily perturbed by the sight of Billy Bluejay wearing a official Nike Creighton warmup jacket. In all my years of watching the Jays, the only thing Billy has worn besides his standard issue white T-shirt with blue "C" is the occasional Santa hat in December.

The jacket's blue-and-black color scheme seems jarring after years of seeing him wear a white shirt...its like Pee Wee Herman wearing anything but a gray suit and a red bow tie. Its like Steve Jobs in anything but a black shirt and jeans. Also, it raises a question. If you're wearing a shirt, and a jacket, why not pants? Just asking.

Now that this is off my chest, on to the game.

With simultaneous NFL playoff and Creighton road game action going on, it sounded like a good excuse to spend the entire day at the bar. So I called up some friends and we headed to the Crescent Moon, where we watched the Redskins get beat by Seattle on the one big screen TV in the bar. A couple of pints and one cheesy-bacon-ranch chicken sandwich later, I was properly primed for the game.

One of the good things about watching road Jays games at the bar is that you don't have to listen to the announcers. Particularly games produced by KMTV. Travis Justice is pretty limited as a play-by-play guy; I think he's solid as a color commentator on the radio broadcasts, but in the play-by-play role he's hard to listen to. It reminds me of Dan Fouts, a formerly decent commentator now struggling in a play-by-play role on ABC's college football. Justice takes a lot of heat from Jays fans, which I think is mostly unfair -- if he was paired with a polished play-by-play guy and could be the commentator, a role in which he excels on radio, everyone would be happy.

On the other hand, Scott Schumacher, the commentator on KMTV's broadcasts, is simply awful. When the trademarks of your broadcasts are uncomfortable interviews with Dana Altman and repeating what your broadcast partner just said in slightly different terms, its not a positive sign.

I hesitate to criticize, even when the camera operators fail to do simple things like check the white-balance on their cameras (seriously!), because I remember all too well the days when the Jays were never on TV. I also have a decent idea of what it costs to put on one of these broadcasts (hint: its not cheap). And looking at the ads during the games tells you businesses aren't exactly waiting in line to advertise. Its the same four or five advertisers, over and over again, and commercial breaks typically have just two or three spots -- as opposed to the usual four or five on FSN or ESPN games.

What I'm saying is...eh, I'm shutting up now. Thank you for broadcasting the games, whatever the production quality! Anyway...

Taking a voluntary sabbatical to chew on this game, and to drink a few beers, saved me from dropping some raw language on my readers. The distance of 36 hours does not make this game any prettier; it remains one of the ugliest, worst played CU games I've ever witnessed. From another slow start, to P'Allen fouling out in just 15 minutes, to Chad Millard's frustrated elbow-to-the-face and subsequent technical foul, it was YOUGLY.

An awful lot of folks are in glass cases of emotion after this one. Myself, I was so upset I thought I heard the distant wails of a long-lost canine friend, and asked him out loud to bark twice if he was in Terre Haute, even though I knew deep down he couldn't hear me. These are the things one does in the heat of the moment, when your team is 0-2 in the league for the first time since the immortal Rick Johnson was the head coach. You remember Rick Johnson, don't you? The strapping lad who took over for Tony Barone, won just 28% of his games, and was fired after just three years and a 24-59 record? That's Rick Johnson. He started 0-2 in the Valley during all three years of his tenure; up until this year, it hadn't happened since. Even in his first sad year, Altman went 1-1 to start the conference season. Whenever you have to bring up Rick Johnson in a comparison, you know its not good.