Creighton 73, Xavier 72

Resiliency is a funny thing. You hate to see a team be resilient, because that means they are losing. We were not losing after the first half against Xavier – we were getting crushed. Combine the electric atmosphere at the Cintas Center in Cincinnati, the favorable “home” calls given to Xavier most of the game, and the lack of defensive presence in the paint for the Bluejays for 20 minutes, and you get a nine point deficit at half. As Dana Altman said in his post game interview, the coaching staff was very disappointed with the first half. “Things were not exactly going our way,” Altman said wryly, acknowledging what most Jays fans watching the game saw – tic-tac fouls on the Jays, no-calls on Xavier, and an apparent shot clock operator who felt the need to pause the 35-second clock during the Jays’ best press of the night.

But that is the great thing about resiliency – if you show heart, determination, and play harder and smarter than your opponent, you can come back from anything. Creighton shot 33% from the field in the first half while being out rebounded 26-6. The Jays were getting manhandled in the paint on both sides of the court, and all of a sudden jump shots were not falling for the boys in blue. To only be down 9 points at half was somewhat of a surprise. What wasn’t surprising, though, was that the Jays came back. You knew that Creighton wouldn’t play 40 minutes of bad basketball, and with the shooters the Jays put on the floor 9 points isn’t necessarily an insurmountable deficit.

So how did the Jays win this game? How resilient were they in the second half? They out rebounded Xavier 16-10 in the final 20 minutes. They hit 5-7 three-point shots (71%), shot 52% from the field overall in the second half, and hit 7-11 from the free throw line. Most importantly, they turned the ball over five times. FIVE! In front of a hostile crowd, against arguably the most athletic team the Jays have faced this year, in their first true road game of the year. And three of those turnovers were by Nate Funk, as he tried to make some type of offense for himself after the Musketeers pressed him defensively beyond the arc and limited his open looks from the perimeter.

The Jays kept their composure. The easy thing for this team to do would have been to quit. They could have responded negatively to the phantom foul calls in the first half, or the repeated dunks that Xavier’s big men kept throwing down. But in the end, it was Xavier’s coach Sean Miller wilting under the pressure. It was my favorite picture from the game – the opposing coach, who’s team lost 11- and 8-point leads in the second half, with a bulging bead of sweat on his brow, trying to draw up a play with 11 seconds left and his team trailing by 1 point at home.

The Jays never quit last night. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of quit in this team. I guess that is what happens when your leader is Tyler McKinney, you have a group of new players with everything to prove, and your coach will not accept poor effort. That is resiliency.