Trying to Stay On Track
(Side note: Can’t we come up with something besides “the Bubble” when discussing college basketball teams that may or may not make the NCAA tournament field? Can the NCAA run a contest for this? Maybe they could offer up some of the millions upon millions of dollars they make off of collegiate student-athletes every year and hold a naming contest? Yeah, probably not.)
Last time I checked in, Creighton claimed a 17-7 record and looked to be more “in” than “out” when it came time for the Web-based prognosticators and sports reporters-turned-Swamis to talk tournament brackets. But with a 6-point lead on the road against Southern Illinois with about 10 minutes to play in the second half, the Jays jumped the track and have lost three of their last five games.
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You may ask why I use the “jump the track” imagery. So, here’s the story (an I have permission from my fiancé to use this for entertainment purposes, so don’t think I’m being inconsiderate for putting this out there. This, like so many others that came before it, is her idea for the Bluejay Basketball blog entry):
Last week, the day after Creighton suffered what will only be referred to (even later in the game recap) as “a late-season slip up,” my fiancé treated her car to a drive through the car wash. No hard labor for her; she was intent on utilizing one of the “please trust us, align your wheels blindly and drive into a track, and then put your car in neutral while we pull your wheels electronically” washes.
I was not with her, but she made contact with me shortly after pulling into the machine and starting her wash cycle. After her car passed the first set of spinning brush-thingies, her car jumped the track, her driver’s side wheel ended up outside of the far wall of the track, and her car was stuck in a person-less car wash.
Not wanting to get out and taste a mouthful of mushy brushes and soapy water, she waited until the cycle finished, she ran up to the gas station’s front counter, and regaled the workers with her harrowing tale of ducking and dashing through a car wash.
How does your car jump a car wash track? Bad things happen when you stick yourself in neutral. What seemed like an easy fix — the employees told her it had happened before, and that they would just call some one and it would get fixed — took hours of sitting at a gas station and then finally having to pull a trick that even an Eagle Scout would be proud of in order to drive out of the car wash, car half-clean, a few hours after entering the machine.
If your wheels are in neutral for any significant length of time, you can jump the track and stall. And it takes more effort than you’d think to get things back on track. Just ask the Jays.
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#21 Southern Illinois 72, Creighton 68
Wow, for as much as the home loss to the Salukis hurt, the Jays played better in the road version. Sure, Creighton seemingly couldn’t hit a bucket in the first 8 or so minutes of the game, but who knew; Texas Tech and Oklahoma State were too busy tripping over each other and playing in double overtime, so Jays fans didn’t get to see the first couple minutes of the game.
SIU staked an 8-point lead in the first half, but the Jays nibbled and nibbled until it was just a 2-point deficit at the break. Nate Funk scored 12 first-half points, and was joined by Dane Watts, Nick Porter, and Anthony Tolliver with 7 each. But, the Jays let Matt Shaw get hot from outside, and he (12 points) and Jamaal Tatum (11 points) paced the Salukis.
SIU wasn’t catching all of the breaks from officials, though, and were whistled for 14 first-half fouls. This, coupled with Creighton’s 5 steals (to SIU’s 1 pick) showed that CU came out aggressively and intent on stopping what has become a burden of a losing streak to Southern.
Creighton pushing SIU defensively in the second half, and the Jays recorded 7 steals in the second stanza. However, our best player was limited to just one shot from the field. Just one shot. ONE. Still, Creighton shot really well in the second half (61%), and the Jays had an 8-point lead halfway through the last half.
But Creighton still couldn’t win. They still couldn’t beat SIU. Southern Illinois shot a Missouri Valley Conference single-half record 86% from the field in the second half; they missed TWO shots. TWO.
And what’s worse still? Creighton had a chance to tie or win at the end of the game! Forget the shooting percentages. Forget that Funk took just one second-half shot. He had the ball in his hand with less than 30 seconds to go and the Jays down 2 points. He tried to dribble-drive and go up for a shot, but the ball was disrupted on his way up from the court. He got a grip, found Porter just outside the paint, and Porter’s floater fell weakly off the front of the rim.
SIU rebound. CU foul. SIU win. Rinse, repeat. Just like the last 8 times the teams have played, the Jays lost. And this one hurt.
Not quite as bad as losing a couple of weeks earlier, but it hurt. It still hurts, especially as SIU has climbed the national polls (they haven’t lost in weeks) and currently sit at #11 in both rankings.
We lost to them by a combined 5 points in the regular season. 5 points that could have easily gone the other way. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. We didn’t, and it hurts.
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Creighton 66, Northern Iowa 55
But, just as he did after losing a tight road game at Wichita State earlier in the year, Dana Altman would need to get his kids ready to go at home against a tough Valley opponent. And, after 20 minutes, things were reverting back to the old Cardiac Q situations that frequented the last couple of seasons at the Qwest Center OMAHA.
Creighton was getting outscored in the paint, and the Panthers took a 5-point lead to the break. Grant Stout (9 points) and Brooks McKowen (10 points) were making the Jays pay for lackluster defense, and McKowen’s contributions specifically were paining the Jays. UNI’s post play — Stout and Eric Coleman — is as good as any Valley team’s presence, but the Panthers’ guards aren’t exactly world-beaters yet. They’re young and inexperienced, save for McKowen. And he was putting the Panther backcourt on his shoulders.
But it was the strong, wide shoulders of Nick Porter that would cut and slash and pound their way into the lane in the second half, abusing most of those weak Panther guards along the way. Porter was perfect from the field and hit 7 of 8 free throws for 17 second-half points, grabbed 5 rebounds in the second frame, and dished out 2 assists in 17 minutes of play. He finished with a career-high 21 points, Funk (14 points) and Watts (16 points) pitched in to help offensively, and Creighton outscored UNI by 16 in the second stanza to post an 11-point win.
Nick Porter's tremendous second half lifted the Jays to a win vs. UNI
It was important for the Jays to get back in the win column, but the first-half effort left something to be desired. Needless to say, those desires would be left unfulfilled in the next two games; two games that could severely damage Funk, Tolliver, Porter, and Manny Gakou’s senior-year goal of ending their CU careers in the NCAA tournament.
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Drexel 64, Creighton 58
So, coming into BracketBuster Saturday, all was (almost) right with life in The Valley. Creighton held what in essence was a three-game lead over Missouri State for second place in the conference (since we beat MSU here and here), and the Jays still had an outside shot to catch league-leader Southern Illinois (even though they beat us here and above). Creighton sat at 18-8, a sold-out crowd would pack The Phone Booth for a nationally-televised night game, and favorite son Kyle Korver was even in the house to raise a few bucks for his foundation.
Kyle Korver raised money for his foundation at Creighton's game vs. Drexel
And everything seemed fine. The Jays seemed to be coasting. Turns out they were in neutral.
The Jays took at 6-point lead into halftime, with neither them nor the Dragons starting out on fire; Drexel shot 29%, the Jays 32%. But Creighton opened the second half with a bit of a surge, and they took a 10-point lead with 11 minutes left to play.
And then the coasting turned to neutral, the Dragons went from driving the speed limit to swerving in and out of control, and the crowd did the same as the Jays were outscored by 12 points in the second half and dropped just the second home game of the season.
It was a weird game; Altman and Drexel head coach Bruiser Flint both picked up technical fouls, Nate Funk couldn’t buy a basket (went just 3 of 11 from the field), and Tolliver’s fouling issue reared its ugly head again with the A Train fouling out.
But it was Tolliver’s 4th foul, not his 5th, that doomed the Jays. With 11 minutes left, Creighton held that 10 point lead, and then Tolliver was called for his 4th personal foul on a basket by Drexel’s Frank Elgar. He sat on the bench until the 7:52 mark, and in that time Drexel went from being down 10 to being ahead by 2 points. The Jays would never recover, and the season suddenly was inching closer to, ahem, the Bubble in front of a national television audience.
Tolliver's foul trouble cost him valuable time on the bench, and perhaps a win for the Jays
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Illinois State 65, Creighton 55
OK. It was a non-conference game. Drexel’s a good road team. Shake it off. Still a get-well game coming up against one of the lower teams in the MVC. The Jays can take Illinois State on the road. No big deal.
Oh, it was a big deal. It was a big, get-the-pin-out-and-get-ready-to-burst-the-(ahem)bubble kind of deal.
Again, the Jays came out in the second half stuck in neutral, the other team just drove (literally, drove for lay-up after lay-up after lay-up) right past them, and Creighton could do nothing but see their at-large chances all but go up in smoke.
At least that’s what I (and most of the other Bluejay fans within the Metro Omaha area) thought. With all of these Web-based prediction sites updating their NCAA tournament “Dance Cards” on a daily basis from about Valentines Day on through Selection Sunday, it is hard not to get caught up in the are-they-in-are-they-out conversations.
And two losses toward the end of the season in games that you controlled at halftime were the kinds of things that the Billy Packers of the world looked for in order to keep schools like Creighton of their tournament projections, in order to make way for schools with big budgets and bigger fan bases.
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Creighton 71, Wichita State 54
The Jays needed to rebound — actually, hitting some shots would work just as well, too — and what better team to bring to Omaha on Senior Day than Mark Turgeon’s Wichita State Shockers.
That might sound a bit off, considering this time last year the Shockers were celebrating a regular-season league title and just starting a magical trek through the NCAA tournament that would result in a Sweet 16 birth.
But after starting this season as hot as any team in the nation and climbing into the Top 10 just before Christmas, the second half of WSU’s season was just as noticeable in a negative way. The Shockers came into an ESPN2-televised afternoon game with a record of 17-12 overall and 8-9 in MVC play; marks that have every black-and-gold clad fan in Kansas wondering what happened to a team that was playing pretty well at the start of the year.
This game was a sellout, too, and The Phone Booth was looking like The White Pages — Creighton jumped on the promotions bandwagon and organized an event hoping to have as many fans as possible wear white to the game, in an attempt to create a visually stunning effect on national television.
The crowd was a "white out" for Wichita, which brought the Jays a win
Not only did the White Out work, but Creighton worked Wichita, the seniors left the Qwest Center (hopefully for good) with a win, and it was in large thanks to a junior.
The letter “X” gets all the love with the term “the X-factor,” but its northern neighbor in the alphabet, W, should get some publicity here. Dane Watts, or the “W-factor” as we’ll call him for the rest of this season, has been simply remarkable down the stretch of the regular season, and Saturday’s game was no different. He’s averaging 10 points and 6 rebounds a game for the season, and he has really come on as of late to give Funk and Tolliver and Porter some help on the offensive side of the ball.
He’s scored in double-figures in 8 of the last 9 games, and the Jays are 6-3 in those contests. In the Illinois State loss, Watts took only two shots. In the other 8 games, he is averaging 15 points. Most importantly, he’s shooting 56% from three-point range in those 8 games, rocketing up the conference games-only chart to place among the best three-point shooters percentage-wise in The Valley. 
Against Wichita State, he hit his first 5 three-point shots, with a release so effortless that it almost looked simple for him. Watts’ shot was inconsistent from the perimeter earlier this season, but instead of bringing down the team by continuing to jack up shots, he hit the boards hard and has recorded a few double-doubles this season while seemingly always being around the boards regardless if he is pulling down the caroms or not. He finished with 15 points on the day, a day that was marked by the fact that a sold-out crowd was able to tell seniors Funk, Tolliver, Porter, and Gakou how much they care, if only by the boisterous applause and standing ovations showered down from the stands as Altman called timeouts in the last minute of play for each of his seniors.
Scenes from Senior Day (Tolliver, Funk, Gakou, and Porter)
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It was hard work, but they Jays have hopefully gotten back on track after a couple of problem losses to Drexel and Illinois State. Just in time for Arch Madness, too, as Creighton looks to segue the #2 seed and second-place finish into a solid showing in St. Louis.
I’ll take a look at the 2007 Arch Madness Missouri Valley Conference tournament bracket and break down all of the predictions tomorrow, as the Jays get set to shift into high gear and bring a title back to Omaha.
posted by Creighton Otter at 11:59 PM
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