All week, we’ll travel back in time two decades to look back at the first NCAA Tournament team of the Dana Altman Era: the 1998-99 MVC Tourney Champion Bluejays. Today in the series conclusion, the Jays win three games in St. Louis to claim the MVC’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, and then mount a second-half comeback to defeat Louisville in the NCAA’s.
To read the entire series, check out the series page.
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Jays’ Defense is the Difference in St. Louis
“Generally in any tournament situation, the team that wins it has to be defensively solid. It’s very unlikely that you’ll shoot the ball real well in three games in a row.” -Dana Altman
Entering the 1999 MVC Tournament, Creighton was winless in St. Louis since 1991. They owned big wins over NCAA Tourney teams Iowa and Oklahoma State. They finished second in a league ranked 7th in the RPI. They also owned a mediocre 5-4 record in February, and that had wiped out their success in November and December, leaving them with one realistic path to their NCAA Tourney goal — winning three games in St. Louis.
In his press conference prior to the tourney, Dana Altman looked into his crystal ball and noted that while Creighton’s MVC-best 77.5 points per game were great, that would not carry them to the title.
“Generally in any tournament situation, the team that wins it has to be defensively solid,” Altman said. “It’s very unlikely that you’ll shoot the ball real well in three games in a row. That goes for rebounding, too. If you get beat badly on the boards one night, your tournament run’s over.”
In the quarterfinals, that’s exactly what happened. Creighton went nearly six minutes before scoring their first point, and their top scorers couldn’t buy a bucket all night long. Buford shot 2-10 from the floor and scored four points. Ryan Sears shot 1-7 overall and 1-6 from three-point range. ISU’s array of junk defenses were very effective. They began the game with a diamond-and-one defense using 5’10” freshman Victor Williams to shadow and smother Buford, and later switched to a triangle-and-two, guarding Buford and Sears man-to-man and the rest of the team with a zone.
And the demons of MVC Tournament failures were starting to creep into their minds — with ten minutes to play, they trailed #7 seed Illinois State 43-39. They were ten minutes away from losing in the quarterfinals two straight years as the two seed.
But their defense was solid, forcing 16 Illinois State turnovers (10 on steals). They were even on the boards overall and grabbed 13 offensive rebounds. And that was particularly true in the decisive final eight minutes of the game. The Jays rattled off a 19-5 run over three minutes to seize control, in the process taking out years of St. Louis frustration on the Redbirds. Buford began the run by ripping away a steal and racing downcourt for a vicious dunk. Walker and Corie Brandon hit back-to-back threes, sandwiched around a defensive stop, and CU took the lead. Another three by Brandon, and a nifty spin move from Nerijus Karlikanovas capped it off with a running jumper to give CU a 58-48 lead.
“The complexion of the game really changed at the eight-minute mark,” Altman said. “We got a little more aggressive offensively and a little tougher defensively, and they ran a little bit out of gas.”
The 68-63 quarterfinal win gave Creighton their 20th win for just the 12th time in program history, and set up a semifinal match with Southwest Missouri State. Two prior meetings that season had been decided by a total of five points, and a simmering feud boiled over in the third meeting.
SMS star William Fontleroy was trash-talking Creighton fans and players prior to tipoff, and Ben Walker didn’t care for it. During pregame introductions, Fontleroy’s name was called by the public address announcer. Ryan Sears was set to be announced next, as the starters were announced in alternating fashion at tourney sites. It was customary for the two opposing players to shake hands at center court in a fairly routine show of sportsmanship. But before Sears could get out of his seat, Walker jumped up, budged in front of Sears to run through the line as a flummoxed P.A. announcer called an audible, and met Fontleroy at half court. Walker greeted him with what could graciously be described as a “firm handshake”, some words not fit for print, and a scowl you had to see to believe.
Then in the midst of a 19-5 opening salvo from the Jays where they made seven of their first 11 shots, SMS coach Steve Alford blew a gasket, was T’d up, and nearly tossed from the game.
Just as he had been in the regular season’s final week, Ben Walker’s tough, demanding presence was becoming the dominant voice in the team’s huddle. It wasn’t just “handling” SMS’ star player who he felt was disrespecting his team. He also scored a team-high 23 points, and his hard-nosed defense was rubbing off on those around him. But with their other marquee offensive weapons continuing to struggle — Buford scored just 16 points on 5-9 shooting, Sears shot 3-7, and Swenson shot 0-4 — SMS clawed back to take a lead, 59-57.
On the next trip down the floor, Buford saved the possession and perhaps the season with a desperation 25-foot three-pointer as the shot clock touched zero. It gave CU a 60-59 lead, and ignited a spark. Their defense forced turnovers on each of the next two SMS possessions, and the Jays capitalized both times. His long three was the start of a game-winning 11-1 run. And after icing the game with 14 made free-throws in the final three minutes, it was off to the MVC Championship Game.
Hang a Banner, Fellas
Standing between Creighton and an MVC title (and NCAA Tournament berth)? Regular season champ Evansville.
Buford’s struggles during the tournament up to that point brought long-time whispers up to a roar — he was a great scorer who disappeared when the lights were brightest. He scored just four points against Illinois State, and had just nine against SMS before hitting that long three-pointer late in the game; he’d wind up with 16 when all was said and done but attempted only nine shots despite playing 38 minutes. In the final, he scored eight points in the first half on just five shots, mostly invisible in what should have been the biggest moment of his career.
Then Ben Walker got in his face at halftime.
The aggressive sophomore who had been emerging as the team’s vocal leader during their late-season surge took the final step toward assuming the role of unofficial captain by motivating their most talented player to take over the game.
“We came in and Ben got on me,” Buford told the media after the game. “He said, ‘You’re not playing like you should, you’re not rebounding and on the offensive end you’ve got to take over.’ That’s what I thought I had to do. I wanted to be the difference–maker.”
Coach Dana Altman joked after the game, “Ben should take over the coaching duties. He’s the one who got him to play. I’ve screamed at him all year and it never did any good. But Ben tells him to rebound and he goes and rebounds.”
The final box score shows that Buford wound up with 21 points and 13 rebounds, along with two steals and a block. The videotape shows another story. He took over the game when it mattered most, on both ends of the floor — making six straight baskets in the second half, playing shut-down defense, rebounding like a madman — literally putting his team on his back and carrying them to a title. In one sequence, he made a nifty floater in the lane, then stole the ball at halfcourt a few seconds later and raced back downcourt for an emphatic slam dunk. During the decisive run of the game, Buford was everywhere. He was at the top of the 1-2-2 zone that sent Evansville’s jump shooters into a cold spell. He was driving into the teeth of the defense, daring the Purple Aces to try to stop him. He was taking, and making, tough shots.
With 10:33 to play, Evansville tied the game 48-48 on a three-pointer by MVC Player of the Year Marcus Wilson. Buford answered by driving to the rim and scoring on a jumper, then by sticking a three-pointer to push the lead out to 53-48. Wilson then hit another three. But after Buford’s jumper, steal, and emphatic dunk, the Jays had taken a 57-51 lead — and the title was all but decided.
Walker had a double-double of his own, with 18 points and 11 rebounds, and remembered the halftime tongue-lashing like this. “He listened, that’s the best part. He didn’t get mad or run off. He listened to me and said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ And then he took over the game.”
It was clear to anyone watching the Jays play during the closing weeks of the 1999 season that Walker was beginning to force the rest of the Bluejays to take on his personality. Altman was asked in his press conference following the championship game about Walker’s halftime speech. The reporter wanted to know what it said about the sophomore that he was able to get in the face of a senior like Buford, who was widely recognized as the team’s best player.
“You saw how Ben is built, right?” Altman joked. “Nobody’s going to (talk back to him).”
Then he got serious. “When Ben is playing hard and being as aggressive as he is,” Altman said, “he has the right to go up to somebody and say, ‘Hey, you need to match my intensity level. You need to match my commitment.’ I think that’s a great part of our team development when guys can do that.”
On the morning of February 17, the Jays sat in fifth place, losers of three of their last four games, and their season outlook looked bleak. In large part due to Walker being successful in getting his teammates to match his intensity, the Jays righted the ship. And six consecutive wins later — three to close out the regular season, three to win the MVC Tournament — they were dancing.
And they weren’t done winning yet.
Upon returning to Omaha, Creighton’s players and coaches found themselves a popular topic around office water coolers and sports talk shows alike — Dana Altman appeared on a dozen nationally-syndicated radio shows in the days following their win. He was happy to take time out of their NCAA prep in the hopes that recruits would learn about Creighton, and people around the country would take notice of what he was building on the hilltop. The story of his five-year rebuild was the dominant theme of most of those interviews, but Altman shrewdly used it to subtly motivate his players, as well.
On the highly-rated “Fabulous Sports Babe” show, an interview he figured his team would be listening to, he said “Our team at times hasn’t been real good at accepting congratulations and then going on and pushing themselves. Hopefully our team has matured a little bit. Now with people patting them on the back, maybe they won’t back off. We’ve still got some things to get straight.”
A crowd of over 700 fans showed up for their Selection Sunday watch party, and Altman was appreciative, half-joking that it was more people than they had at their games during his first season. Their opponent would be one of the blue bloods of the sport: Louisville, coached by the legendary Denny Crum.
‘Overlooked’ Jays Use Doubt as Motivation in NCAA Tourney
“We’ve got a lot of hard-working guys and you can’t take us for granted. If you don’t know about us, we’re going to sneak up on you and bite you.” – Rodney Buford
Despite a 7-1 record against teams that made the tourney, and despite being slotted in a tossup 10/7 matchup, hardly anyone outside of Omaha considered the Jays to be a serious contender to advance when bracketologists were debating the 1999 NCAA Tournament. The reason? Their opponent wore “LOUISVILLE” across their chest, giving them name recognition and respect that belied their pedestrian 19-11 record. They’d earned that thanks to 22 NCAA trips, six Final Fours and two national championships in the 28 years Denny Crum had been head coach.
“Everyone’s overlooking us,” Creighton senior Rodney Buford told the media on the eve of the game. “Everybody’s talking about what Louisville is going to do and what they have to do to get out of here. With us being a smaller school, they don’t know what we have and they don’t know what we can do. We’ve got a lot of hard-working guys and you can’t take us for granted. If you don’t know about us, we’re going to sneak up on you and bite you.”
All that talk apparently influenced the Cardinal players, who (according to an anecdote relayed by Tom Shatel in a column the day after the game) yelled during the morning shootaround “You can’t hang with us!” at a group of Creighton players.
In the first half, at least, it looked like that might be true. Louisville burst out of the gate to an early 13-6 lead, making Creighton’s man-to-man defense look slow and timid. “At that first TV timeout I was so darn mad,” Dana Altman noted after the game. “They had 13 points already and we were playing tentative. We just had to try to get something to slow the game down. They were just getting good shots on us and easy stuff inside.”
They scrapped the man-to-man and went to a zone, which slowed the game down and kept it close enough for them to have a chance. Still, they trailed 31-23 at the half, and five minutes into the second half trailed 40-27 — a deep enough hole to cause CBS to switch many areas of the country who had been seeing the game to something more competitive.
Then a funny thing happened. During the under-16 timeout, Altman decided to switch from their “soft” press to an aggressive, full-court press with Doug Swenson and his long arms at the front of it to harass the inbounds pass. They’d run the aggressive press before; they’d rarely, if ever, done it with Swenson in that role. It was a brilliant tactical move by Altman, and combined with their zone defense in the half-court, it completely befuddled the Cardinals, who clearly were not prepared for it. The Jays rattled off a 22-7 run over the next 12:30, grabbing a 49-47 lead when Ben Walker converted a three-point play at the 3:04 mark. Their gritty comeback won over the Orlando Arena crowd, and those without ties to the Cardinals were suddenly pulling for the Jays.
Walker’s ability to rub off on his teammates was already becoming the stuff of legend. Then in the midst of that 22-7 Bluejay run, Rodney Buford dove for a loose ball, and there was no longer any debate. Yes, Buford, who Dana Altman had spent the better part of four seasons pleading with, begging with, doing anything he could to convince him to play defense, to out-hustle an opponent instead of trying to out-score him. That guy was suddenly diving head-first onto the floor for a loose ball, fighting and scrapping with an opponent.
“Rodney’s not the kind of guy who will throw his body on the floor if he can help it,” Walker said afterward. “When we saw that, that fired us up.”
It was the first time anyone could remember Buford being willing to “risk getting his Bluejay feathers dirty”, as Tom Shatel wrote in the next morning’s World-Herald. Buford claimed he’d dove for a ball in the MVC Championship win over Evansville. Teammate Doug Swenson begged to differ.
“That was a pseudo-dive,” he joked to national media suddenly searching for quotes about the victorious Bluejays. “In that one, he kind of laid on top of somebody. That didn’t count. This time he actually dove. There was a possibility of a floor burn. The judges gave him a point.”
Louisville tied it up on the next possession. And then Buford hit the shot of his career, making a long-three with the shot clock winding down that gave Creighton a 52-49 lead. Gus Johnson — years before he became THE Gus Johnson — yelled out on the CBS broadcast which was now being seen across most of America, “Rodney Buford for the lead…OOOOHHHH! Holy mackarel! From DOWN-TOWN!!”
The Jays would go a perfect 10-10 from the free-throw line over the final two minutes to ice the victory. Their gritty upset of one of the sport’s blue bloods landed them on the cover of USA Today’s Sports section and as the lead story on SportsCenter, and made them the darlings of the college basketball world for about 24 hours. And with the spotlight of national media descending upon them, the nation learned all kinds of fun things about the team:
- Ben Walker turned down an offer to play football at Nebraska as an I-Back, something he tried to hide from the notoriously-Husker obsessed Omaha media. “I’ve never wanted to say anything about it because I was afraid somebody would come knocking on my door and tell me that they need an I-back,” he told USA Today with not even a hint of sarcasm.
- Dana Altman, who had spent five seasons avoiding talking about his departure from K-State, told ESPN with minimal prodding that “There were a lot of people there who didn’t think I won enough games. Creighton wanted me to be their coach. You’ve got to have everyone pulling in the same direction or it doesn’t work.”
- Rodney Buford told Sports Illustrated that his biggest pet peeve was people mispronouncing his school’s name. “People pronounce it, ‘Cri-ton.’ That really gets to me. Nobody knows who we are.”
(As a special bonus, check out a vintage three-minute ESPN segment on the game featuring an interview with Dana Altman and commentary from Digger Phelps and Dick Vitale. We found it at the end of an old VHS tape of the game, and found it amusing.)
Creighton’s reward for winning their first-round NCAA Tournament game against Louisville? A matchup with the fifth-ranked team in America, the Maryland Terrapins, a team stocked with future NBA talent like Steve Francis, Juan Dixon, Terence Morris, Lonny Baxter and Laron Profit. That’s right — of the top six players on Maryland’s roster in this game, five of them went on to play in the NBA.
The Jays’ season ended with a 75-63 loss to that uber-talented squad. But the tenacity they had made their trademark over the season’s final stretch was on full display.
Dana Altman built an inspired defensive strategy for containing Steve Francis — a box-and-one using Ben Walker as the stopper — that worked brilliantly, forcing the superstar guard into seven turnovers and leaving him dizzy and confused, able to dish out only two assists. Walker had an amazing game offensively, too, going 6-7 from the floor and 3-4 from three-point range, earning praise from the CBS crew of Gus Johnson and Dan Bonner for his tenacity defensively and his efficiency offensively.
A close game early was broken open with a 16-5 Maryland run to close the first half, a hole that would have been deeper if not for a Rodney Buford three at the buzzer. As the second half commenced, the Terps stretched their lead out to 21, but the game was far from over. Led by Walker, the Jays scrapped, clawed and fought, and finally went on an 11-2 run to slice the lead down to 10 with just over five minutes left. Turnovers on Maryland’s next two possessions gave Creighton a chance to cut in the lead even further, but Buford, Ryan Sears and Corie Brandon all missed good looks at three-pointers, stopping their momentum and giving the Terps a chance to catch their breath before closing out the win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exbfoIupsoE
“We didn’t give up,” Walker said. “That was very important to us.”
“It would have been very easy to throw in the towel today,” Altman said. “It’s about like it was in mid-February when we were 15-8 and it didn’t look like we were going anywhere. But then they kind of toughened up and fought a little bit and had themselves a respectable season.”
That respectable season saw them win the MVC Tournament, and win a game in the NCAA Tournament. Altman reflected on it in the days following the loss, telling the World-Herald that “I think it gives them a little better idea what they’re playing for and the excitement that this tournament generates. It’s been so long since we’ve experienced this that no one on our team could talk about it. Now we’ve got some guys who can talk about it with the new guys coming in. I hope it will help us.”
As usual, Altman was right.
It had been a long time between NCAA appearances before the 1998-99 team returned to the dance. But that squad was the beginning of a new era for CU hoops — they’d play in each of the next four tournaments, and five of the next six, an unprecedented run of success for the program that saw them dominate the conference tournament like no MVC school had done before. Each successive group of recruits passed the expectation of greatness on to the next. Walker and Sears passed the torch to Kyle Korver and Brody Deren, who did the same with Anthony Tolliver and Nate Funk.
And it all began with that magical 1998-99 team.
