Last Wednesday night at the Big East Tournament, as St. John’s was mounting a historic, furious comeback to take down Georgetown, the sports world was in chaos. The worldwide coronavirus pandemic was beginning to cause cancellations, with one domino after another falling. In a matter of just a couple of hours — overlapping the end of that St. John’s/Georgetown game and the start of the second game of the night between DePaul and Xavier — things escalated faster than you could keep up with.
At 3:30pm Omaha time, the first big domino fell as the NCAA announced it was holding the tournament without fans. At 5:38pm, the Big Ten announced it was closing its tournament to fans starting with Thursday’s session. The Big XII followed suit two minutes later. The ACC joined them at 5:58. The NBA announced the postponement of the Utah/Oklahoma City game at 7:40…and then 47 minutes later, at exactly 8:27pm, the NBA said that Jazz player Rudy Gobert had tested positive for coronavirus. Four minutes after that, the NBA suspended the remainder of their season indefinitely.
The Big East waited until after DePaul had defeated Xavier 71-67 to announce that the rest of their tourney would be played without the general public in attendance. For Creighton, playing St. John’s without a partisan NYC crowd in attendance seemed more like a positive than a negative. But the way things were moving, everyone wondered if the four quarterfinal games scheduled for Thursday would be played at all.
Sure enough, as tipoff neared on Thursday morning, word began trickling through a mostly-empty Madison Square Garden — the crowd limited to a few friends and family of each team, plus the bands — that one league after another were canceling their tournaments. A scattering of mid-major leagues had done so earlier in the day, but when the mighty SEC pulled the plug on theirs at 10:47am Omaha time, it was like a lid had been lifted. The American canceled theirs one minute later. The Big Ten canceled theirs a minute after that. The crosstown A-10 tourney in Brooklyn pulled teams off the floor three minutes before tipoff and canceled theirs at 10:57am.
All the while, Creighton and St. John’s went through their final warmups. The national anthem was played. At 12 noon eastern, the WAC and CUSA canceled their tournaments. Meanwhile, the starting lineups for the Jays and Johnnies were announced. At 12:03pm, Notre Dame announced they were suspending recruiting and spring football practice. Still nothing from the Big East. So referee James Breeding shrugged his shoulders, looked at both coaches as if to say ‘I don’t get it, either’, and blew his whistle. Game on.
And so the game began.
As expected, the Jays’ plan without Marcus Zegarowski was to move Denzel Mahoney into the starting five. The 200 or so Bluejay fans that were allowed in the building were loud, and at the under-16 timeout the teams were tied 7-7. During the timeout, the ACC and the Pac-12 both canceled the remainder of their tournaments. Still nothing from the Big East, as college basketball fans nationwide simultaneously turned to FS1 to watch the only hoops game taking place and to mock the league for stubbornly sticking to its guns by playing said game.
What no one knew was that Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman was in a previously scheduled meeting at 10:00am eastern with university presidents and athletic directors. By the time it wrapped, the game was tipping off. The league’s leadership threw together a hastily-assembled conference call to discuss what everyone else already knew, and that they were only just now finding out about.
Back on the floor at MSG, Creighton and St. John’s continued to play. The pace was relentless, and Creighton SID Rob Anderson said on Twitter that it reminded him of two baseball teams swinging at every pitch to try and beat a rain delay. Everyone knew what was happening across the sports landscape — with just 500 or people in the building, fans could hear everything the players and coaches said, and players and coaches could hear chatter from the fans.
At some point midway through the half, Ackerman made the call to pull the plug on the rest of the tourney, joining every other league across the country. But her leadership team opted to let the rest of the half play out first.
โIt was our view that we didnโt feel like we needed a dramatic, pull-the-players-off-the-court-in-the-middle-of-the-game gesture,โ Ackerman said in a press conference later in the day. โWe just literally didnโt think that another 15 or 20 minutes of game time was going to make that much a difference.โ
If a player had been injured, those 15 or 20 minutes would have made a huge difference. But that didn’t happen, thankfully. What did happen was Jett Canfield having a moment.
The former walk-on, granted a scholarship for the second semester this year, got extended minutes with Zegarowski out. And with CU trailing 18-17, he hit not one:
But two 3-pointers:
Mitch Ballock hit a pair, too, and in the process joined the 1,000 Point club. Canfield and Ballock’s back-to-back threes gave the Jays a 24-19 lead as the game headed into the under-eight timeout.
St. John’s responded shortly after with a 12-0 run, as CU started compounding mistake after mistake — they turned the ball over, committed fouls trying to defend, and missed several shots they normally make. And when Ty-Shon Alexander missed a three at the buzzer, Creighton headed to the locker room down 38-35.
That’s when they found out it wasn’t just the half that was over, but the game, as Big East Associate Commissioner Stu Jackson delivered the news to Greg McDermott in the locker room. With the teams notified, it was announced over the loudspeaker inside MSG. And as usual, Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” played what few fans remained out of the arena, onto the streets of NYC to an uncertain hoops future.
With the game canceled, it went into the books as just that — canceled — meaning that everything that happened is erased from the history books. Mitch Ballock will have to wait a bit longer to join the 1,000 Point club officially. Jett Canfield’s game of his life, eight points on 3-of-3 shooting in seven minutes, lives on only in our memories (and in tweets like this one from his sister).
The box score itself was scrubbed from existence, meaning one of the only places it’s preserved is in this screenshot that play-by-play man John Bishop shared on Twitter before the game had been called.
Speaking of Bishop, he was in tears as he finished a courtside interview with coach Steve Merfeld, the reality of this being the end of a magical season setting in.
“I didn’t think I could have more fun than I did our first year together in this conference,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s a credit to you guys, to Mac and the whole staff…I’ve gotta say this. These young men are special. They are. It’s a great, great group of young men. I am so proud to be allowed to tell their story. I am proud to be affiliated with all of you guys. I’ve been thinking about this for awhile because I didn’t know when this would come to an end, and now it is. I know we get a lot of people in our culture who always look down at the young generation and say, ‘Oh, you’re soft, you don’t do anything.’ I’m telling you right now, if that group of young men are a microcosm of what the future holds, we’re going to have a bright future. There’s some leaders in there, beyond basketball, that are just going to be great, great men. I just want to let everyone know how much they have meant to me just watching them as men.”
And then there was silence, as the play-by-play man and the coach could no longer hold it back. Listeners back in Omaha — myself included — were right there with them.
After the game, Greg McDermott sat down for a 15-minute video interview with media to talk about the strange circumstances surrounding the morning’s game-that-wasn’t, and as he usually does, was able to put a positive spin on it.
โI would have felt better if theyโd have pulled [the game] when we were up 24-17,โ McDermott said, joking with reporters. โThose are tough, hard decisions to make. I respect the way they handled it and am confident that they got all information they needed [to do so].โ
A few hours later, they’d find out it wasn’t just the game that ended prematurely, but also their season. The NCAA officially canceled the tournament at 4:16pm eastern time.
Early the next morning, word came down that it was not just basketball, but everything — sports at Creighton were on hold indefinitely.
***
So that’s it. No Big East Tournament. No March Madness. No chance at the magical March run Bluejay fans have been waiting decades for, one that seemed closer than ever to grasping. For the 2019-20 Bluejaysย were among, if not the, most accomplished teams in program history.
They hung a banner as 2020 Big East Regular Season champs. They finished #7 in the final AP Top 25 poll, their best-ever finish. They beat six ranked teams, most in school history. And it endsย before we find out what they could have done on the sport’s biggest stage. It’s understandable, given the circumstances, but no less unfortunate.
Still, asย bad as Jays fans feel for their team, imagine Seton Hall. They just wrapped up their own historic season and were poised to do damage in March, but with a team led by seniors who don’t get another chance. Or imagine Marquette, who slumped into March but was still poised to give Markus Howard one more chance to light up someone for 50 points in a tourney game, and will now live with his last game in a Golden Eagle jersey coming in a rather meaningless game they did not win.
Creighton, on the other hand, gets another chance. In early preseason polls, they’ve been as high as #3, with serious discussion from some who cover college basketball that the Jays could enter 2020-21 as the preseason #1. (No, really.)
And why not? Every single key contributor returns, including AP Honorable Mention All-American Marcus Zegarowski — one of just five sophomores in Creighton history to be an All-American, joining Paul Silas, Rick Apke, Benoit Benjamin and Doug McDermott. And they add freshman phenom Ryan Kalkbrenner, a healthy Jacob Epperson, and Memphis transfer Antwann Jones to the active roster. They’ll have size when they need it. They’ll still have their version of the death lineup intact to flummox everyone else. They’ll be even tougher to beat, on paper, then they were this year.
But that’s next year.
This year should still be a thing, it isn’t, and that stings. It’s OK to think so, even while acknowledging that as the world copes with the COVID-19 pandemic, struggles through social distancing and quarantines and worse, it all feels a bit inconsequential.
So we’re left with this: November will be here sooner than you think, and when it arrives, Creighton will take the floor as one of the preseason favorites not only in the Big East but in the entire country.
