Most college basketball coaches prefer to hand out a syllabus and maybe break a marginal amount of sweat on the first day of the season. Creighton head coach Jim Flanery tends to skip past the formalities and go straight to the final exam and see how his team responds.
Would the Jays perform favorably on day one in front of 2,500 fans at one of the most underrated hostile environments in the Midwest? In the only ranked vs. ranked matchup in all of college basketball, against a South Dakota State team that brought back six of its top seven scorers after going 29-9 and winning the NIT last season, would the Jays be able to come from behind after a slow start offensively? Would they be able to survive junior point guard Molly Mogensen getting in early foul trouble without a healthy true second option?
The answer to all of that came with 24.3 seconds left in the game when Flanery turned back to his players and belted out a “F— YEAH!” just before they broke down the final huddle to close out a hard-fought 78-69 win at Frost Arena.
“It feels unbelievably good to come out with that win,” Flanery said. “I know that we are experienced and balanced and we play well together, but to do it in this environment on game one, that’s impressive. I was hopeful that’s who we were, and we were. You have to play for 40 minutes to beat these guys up here.”
Creighton wasn’t perfect on Monday night. But they were the tougher, especially in crunch time. That’s a loud statement on its own against an opponent that was confident they would be able to check that box in the matchup comparison going into the contest. CU worked harder on both ends of the floor. They played smarter. They fought for every rebound and loose ball. Oh yeah, and they also had Lauren Jensen. The junior sharpshooter, and star of last year’s run to the Elite Eight, scored at all three levels, finished with both her left and right hand on drives to the rim, and ran her defenders ragged through screens and re-screens on her way to a career-high 30 points.
While the Jays were stringing together stops, she was turning them into buckets on the other end. After going scoreless for the 14+ minutes, Jensen scored nine of her team’s last 12 points of the second quarter to get them within three at the break. Then she produced 13 of Creighton’s 23 points in the third quarter with five points of her own to go along with four assists. She saved the best for last with 16 points in the fourth quarter — only one fewer than South Dakota State’s entire team — to cushion the lead and seal the win. Over the last 25:20, she shot 9-of-15 from inside the arc, 4-of-6 from 3-point territory, and 6-for-6 from the free throw line. All while only turning the ball over one time.
“My shots weren’t really falling the first few that I took in the first half,” Jensen said. “I feel like I was kind of sped up. Going into the locker room we knew that we could do better holding our screens and cutting. We kind of settled in in the second half and Flan started running some actions for me. I was able to see some shots fall and I kind of went from there.”
Last season, Creighton started off with road losses to Drake and Nebraska — by a total of eight points — sandwiched around a choppy home win over Omaha. They wanted to rectify that this year. So far so good, but Monday night was only page one of the test. Next, they hop on the bus again and head back up north to face a South Dakota squad that is coming off a Sweet 16 run last spring. That is followed by a home-opener against the aforementioned Huskers. Then a five-game road trip over the span of two weeks against the likes of Northern Iowa, Omaha, Xavier, Villanova, and St. John’s. After that, they close out non-conference play against Drake, Arkansas, and Stanford before facing UConn and DePaul on the other side of their Christmas break.
“We play enough good teams to where we aren’t going to be penalized for losing to them, but you’ve got to beat some of them,” Flanery said. “Tonight, on paper, is one of the tougher matchups that we are going to have just because of the environment and the fact that they had so much momentum. They won six games in a row, won the NIT, had a lot of people back, and the place was jumping. We knew it was going to be tough.
“But this win doesn’t mean as much if we aren’t ready to play on Thursday against a team that lost a lot, but one that knows how to win because they have a winning culture. We are going to find out if we can back it up.”
The recipe for success isn’t complicated for this team. They’ll have to be unselfish. They’ll have to screen and cut and pass up good shots for themselves to set up great ones for their teammates. They’ll have to score effectively, efficiently, and at a prolific rate. They’ll have to scrap and claw on the defensive glass to overcome certain matchups. But the main component to their potential success is going to be toughness. They are going to be in a lot of close games. A lot of games will be decided by the team who digs the deepest in the fourth quarter when the legs are cramping and the lungs are burning. This group wants to prove that last spring was just the beginning, and that being tough and unflappable under pressure is as much a part of their DNA as any of their other attributes.