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 Part One we look at how the team was built piece-by-piece.
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In the spring of 1994, Dana Altman left Kansas State to take the reigns of a Creighton program that had fallen on hard times. The wreckage of the Rick Johnson Era left a crater: single-digit win totals, regular crowds of 1,500 fans at a desolate Civic Auditorium, and a very real fear that Creighton’s President, the Rev. Michael Morrison, would decide Division 1 sports was no longer a realistic endeavor.
Athletic Director Bruce Rasmussen convinced Altman to take a chance on the Bluejays, and convinced Creighton’s board to take a chance at the big time by hiring an accomplished coach. Altman compiled a four-year record of 68-54 at Kansas State, including a 20-14 record his last season and a trip to the Final Four of the NIT. His first year in Omaha, he had to work with what Johnson had left him, which wasn’t much, and the Jays had only marginally better results, finishing 7-19 and 4-14 in the MVC. They were still mired in last place. They shot an incredibly bad 55% from the free throw line. They lost 11 of their final 12 games.
But in the offseason, the Jays lost three players to graduation and four more who were either asked to leave or left of their own accord, leaving Altman and staff essentially a clean slate to rebuild from. They signed JuCo players Chuckie Johnson, Carteze Loudermilk and Edward St. Fleur to give them immediate help, and freshmen Rodney Buford, Kevin Mungin, Chris Chestnut and Lamont Scott to build for the future.
The last of that group of seven players to sign, Buford was seen as the key building block. He averaged 19.0 points and 7.0 rebounds during his senior season at Milwaukee’s Vincent High School, leading them to an 18-4 record while earning second-team All-City Conference honors. At the time of his signing, his coach Tom Diener commented, “Rodney has a tremendous amount of potential. I don’t have any problem in saying that I think he has the most potential of any high school player coming out of Wisconsin this year.”
Diener told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that “Rodney attracted a lot of attention, but he didn’t get his test scores until late. A lot of schools took a wait-and-see approach with Rodney, but by the time he cleared, they had already signed other kids. A lot of schools weren’t willing to wait for him. Creighton did. They stayed with him all the way.”
Greg Grensing had recruited Buford, and as the staff watched him in summer tourneys prior to his senior season, Altman wavered. Grensing spent over a year keeping Buford on the staff’s radar, while staying in contact with Buford. That tenacity finally won the head coach over, and the Jays saved a scholarship back just in case his test scores came back high enough for admission. When they did late in the signing period, the Jays got a highly-regarded player who came in ready to prove his doubters wrong.
Starting with that 1995 recruiting class, the team’s fortunes turned quickly, and by Altman’s second season, they tied for fifth in the MVC with a 9-9 record. Buford broke the school’s freshman scoring record with 421 points, besting Benoit Benjamin’s previous high. He averaged 14.1 points a game, which was the 12th highest mark by a freshman in all of Division 1 that season. And he won the Missouri Valley Conference’s Freshman of the Year Award as well as the Newcomer of the Year Award.
Altman’s third Bluejay team finished 10-8 in the Valley, with Buford once again leading the way. He had just two games where he failed to score in double figures, averaged 19.6 points and 5.6 rebounds per game, and broke Paul Silas’ sophomore record for points scored with 589. He was an offensive explosion every single night, but with his defense and rebounding often an afterthought (when he thought about them at all) and a collection of role players surrounding him, there was only so far the Jays could go.
Still, entering his fourth season on the Hilltop in 1997-98, Altman felt they were close to a breakthrough.
“I think anybody who’s watched our program knows that we’re a heck of a lot closer now than we were when I started,” Altman said on media day before that season. “I’ve been a little disappointed that it’s gone a little slower than I hoped — I thought last year we should have won two or three more games and then I maybe say we were right on — but if you take the pure wins and losses out of it, then I say, yeah, we’re making continued strides.
“Has it happened as quickly as we wanted? No.”
“Human nature is that we’re all impatient,” Athletic Director Bruce Rasmussen told the Omaha World-Herald before the season. “And sometimes you can get so involved that you misjudge progress that’s been made. Most people evaluate progress by the bottom line. Did you make more money than you did last year? Did you win more games than you did last year?
“If you talk to CEOs and presidents of companies, they’ll tell you a lot of times they make their biggest jumps in years where they don’t have their biggest profit. But they put more things in place to solidify their business. I think the same thing happens in athletics.”
History would prove that to be true in the case of Dana Altman’s rebuild of Creighton Basketball.
His fourth Bluejay team catapulted all the way to second place with a 12-6 record in the league that included nine straight wins. Freshmen Ryan Sears and Ben Walker made an immediate impact, as did junior college transfers Corie Brandon and Doug Swenson.
Sears was a three-time first-team all-conference selection at Ankeny High School, was second-team all-state as both a sophomore and junior, and first-team all-state as a senior. That senior year, he led his school to the Iowa Class 4A (the largest class) state championship, averaged 18 points and four assists, and earned academic all-state honors. He drew late interest from the state schools after his stellar senior season, but having already verbally committed to Creighton, he stood by his commitment and signed with the Jays. He was the 1998 MVC Freshman of the Year after starting every game, averaging 4.8 assists, 10.5 points, 3.0 rebounds, and 2.2 steals a game.
Walker was a star running back in high school, and was recruited by seven Big Ten schools to play football. But he was quite the basketball player, too, and led his team in rebounds each of his three varsity seasons — despite often being among the shortest players on the floor. Named the best guard in the state of Wisconsin by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel after his junior year, following his senior year, he was named first-team all-state and “Player of the Year” in his conference. He decided to play basketball instead of football, spurning all those Big Ten offers to play hoops at Creighton. He quickly became an indispensable part of the lineup, a rebounding machine who could put the ball on the floor and barrel to the rim, shoot threes, and defend tenaciously. They were the perfect compliment to the high-flying, alpha-scorer in Buford.
And Swenson was a 6’10”, 215-pound JuCo transfer from Bismarck State College, about 90 minutes from his native Halliday, N.D. His skillset and wiry frame was one of the main reasons the Bluejays switched to a high-post offense. “We didn’t want to stick him down on the block, where people who were bigger and stronger could sit there and beat on him and wear him out,” Altman told the World-Herald in a January, 1999 feature on Swenson. “But you put him outside and those same people can’t guard him.”
Despite winning 18 games, they flamed out in the quarterfinals of Arch Madness for the third straight season, becoming the first #2 seed to lose to a #7 in that tourney in over a decade when Bradley knocked them off 76-68.
“I’m very disappointed for our players and for our fans, because there were a lot of them here,” Altman said in the aftermath. “I think we’re a better team than what we played. We had a nice run this year. We just didn’t play very well tonight.
“I don’t know if we’ll get to play again. I hope we get some kind of opportunity, maybe in the NIT. If they need a team, we’d sure like to play.”
A 80-68 loss at Marquette in the NIT ended the season on a four-game losing streak, but for the first time since the days when Tony Barone roamed the sidelines, Creighton basketball was relevant and on the upswing. Not even Dana Altman and Bruce Rasmussen could have envisioned what was around the corner, however.
From Preseason Favorites to Exhibition Blues
The Bluejays returned 11 players from the 1997-98 team, including seven who played 16+ minutes a game — and three starting guards in Buford, Sears, and Walker. Seniors Corie Brandon and Cliff Bates provided a veteran presence off the bench. And underclassmen Matt West and Justin Haynes gave them the kind of quality depth they’d lacked.
The 6’10” Swenson was slated to take over the starting role in the middle after a solid junior season coming off the bench. 6’7″ Donnie Johnson, a redshirt junior from Omaha Central, and 6’8″ junior college transfer Nerijus Karlikanovas gave the Jays legit size and depth in the frontcourt. And an intriguing prospect from Kansas City, 6’9″ Alan Huss, was ready to contribute in his second year on the Hilltop.
A 35-point win in their exhibition opener seemed to validate the preseason buzz around the program — they were picked as the preseason favorite in the Missouri Valley Conference by most publications, they were receiving votes in the preseason Top 25 polls, and season tickets topped the 4,000 mark.
But Altman was displeased in the level of competition Bulgaria CSKA gave them, and tried to get his players — and the fans — to pump the brakes a bit on the preseason hype. The Bulgarians played only six men, and three went the full 40 minutes.
“I’m just not sure we were able to do some of the things we’re capable of,” Altman said. “The game just got sloppier than I wanted it. We needed a better game.”
They got it in their second exhibition. Team Pella, made up of college all-stars, had the talent and the experience to take advantage of a Bluejay team feeling a bit too impressed with themselves after reading the preseason hype. The Jays had three “lackluster” practices, as Altman called it, and turned in an equally lackluster performance in the game.
Swenson was benched from his starting spot and didn’t get into the game until 12 minutes had passed. Karlikanovas started in his place, and was yanked from the game in the second half after taking a three-pointer so early in a possession that there were no teammates down court to rebound his missed shot — and got such an earful from an enraged Altman that the entire one-sided conversation was audible throughout the Civic.
Creighton was outrebounded 47-38, committed 17 turnovers and took a lot of “questionable” shots, in Altman’s words.
“There’s a lot of areas that we need a lot of improvement on,” he said. “I don’t think it’s one area or two areas. I think it’s every area. We’re just not sharp with a lot of different things right now.”
“We tried to get after them pretty good Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and we didn’t have good practices. We played tonight like we practiced the last three days.”
Team Pella led most of the night, as a combination of ice-cold shooting and indifferent defense from the Bluejays were proving to be a bad mix. The Jays made just three of their first 17 shots in the second half, and 10 of 31 overall. Pella held a 74-71 edge with 2:23 to play. Then two free throws by Karlikanovas, a three-point play by Swenson and a basket by Walker, sandwiched around a pair of turnovers from Pella, allowed the Jays to escape with a 80-77 win.
“You’re not going to shoot it well every night,” Sears said afterward. “If you defend well and rebound well, then you’re still going to stay in games. If you don’t, and you let those slide, you’re going to get blown out on days when you don’t shoot well.”
“This was about the same thing as a loss in my mind. This has got to be a wakeup call for us. We can play a lot better.”
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Tomorrow in Part II, the Bluejays respond to Altman’s annoyance by blowing out UMKC in the opener, and turn heads around the country with a true road win at Iowa.
