Yesterday was my bosses’ birthday, and we brought in a homemade meal of her favorite food for lunch: Meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad, rhubarb pie and ice cream. I was entrusted with bringing in the ice cream, because my considerable cooking skills are not yet trusted. I may be the Creative/Web Production Manager for an advertising agency, but I’ve only been here two months. They trust my kerning; they do not trust my baking.
Meatloaf! The bombastic, theatrical singer and star of such cinematic masterpieces as Fight Club and Wayne’s World? I like him very much. A loaf of bread made out of various and sundry meats? Not so much.
Why do I tell you this? For once in my life, I got a prediction right, and not just right — REALLY right. It must be the meatloaf. Has to be. How else do you explain me writing this yesterday?
“I think the hangover from 50 minutes of shoddy play in St. Louis, coupled with the disappointment of playing in the NIT, will lead to an ugly first half. I have an awful feeling that Bowling Green is going to jump out to an early lead, perhaps by double digits. Somehow, the Jays will find a way to come back.
Creighton 69, Bowling Green 64”
Doesn’t that sound like essentially an elevator speech version of the game recap? Sure does. For a couple of hours yesterday, I was marvelously clairvoyant. I also warned a co-worker that he was not only going to eat pie and ice cream, but that he was going to get an ice-cream headache when he ate it too fast.
It was like I’d taken a Quantum Leap into the body of Ed Glosser: Trivial Psychic. Truly bizarre.
So…
The hangover from 50 minutes of shoddy play in St. Louis, coupled with the disappointment of playing in the NIT, led to an ugly first half.
Haha!
After the jump, I stop messing around and get to the actual recap. Join me, won’t you?
*****
10 days separated the Jays’ blowout loss to Illinois State and their NIT First Round matchup. If the disappointment of being in the NIT wasn’t bad enough, the rust from 10 days without a game compounded it. The first half of the game looked like a continuation of all of the nightmarish qualities of the Illinois State game: historically poor offensive production for the Jays and equally historic offensive production for their opponent.
Darryl Clements equalled the Jays scoring output by himself during a 31-13 run that lasted nearly ten-minutes in the first half. The Falcons hit six three pointers during that stretch; meanwhile, the Jays were shooting just 26% from the floor and were en route to 0-11 shooting from behind the arc.
You knew that both extremes were not sustainable. The odds of Creighton shooting 26% two games in a row is roughly the same as the odds of me drinking coffee in the morning. I do not drink coffee. Based on my bottled-water-in-the-morning math, I figured despite a 14-point deficit, the game was not yet out of reach.
The same cannot be said for the guy sitting two rows behind me, who spent the entire first half ripping each and every player, by name, in a booming voice. You know that old adage that people who rip players to shreds on message boards would never do so in person? This guy was making that adage seem quaint, and his soliloquies had all the vitriol of the anti-Jays threads that polluted the Bluejay Cafe in January with none of the anonymity.
During the tail end of the 31-13 run, he yelled out, “That’s it, I can’t take this anymore!” He made a rather large production about leaving. I couldn’t help it and said to my buddy sitting next to me, in a loud enough voice that the guy could hear me, “Hurry up and leave, you won’t be missed.”
Just as my meatloaf clairvoyance had predicted, the Falcons hot shooting was not sustainable. Shots stopped falling, the rebounding margin narrowed, the Jays shots started falling (at least inside the arc), and by halftime, the deficit was sliced to a manageable 8 points.
After the break, the negative guy returned, and although the team was playing better, he still found things to gripe about. I overheard him make a comment about how he wished the people in front of him would sit down so he could “watch this embarrassing display without looking at the g**d*** video board!”, meaning the people two rows in front of me (and four rows in front of him). It doesn’t take much for me to be ornery, and I decided to stand up and cheer, partly because the team was making a run and needed support, but mostly because the negative guy was pissing me off — and I now had knowledge of a button to push to piss him off in return. You bet.
Over the first ten minutes of the second half, the Jays slowly chipped into the lead. Like a faucet dripping, they slowly drew down the deficit point by point. Finally with just under 11 minutes to play, they cut the lead to 51-49 on a dunk by Kenny Lawson. Unfortunately, as so often happens when a team has a big deficit, so much energy is expended coming back that they can’t get over the hump once they get close. In under 90 seconds, the lead was back to eight for Bowling Green.
With 4:40 to play, the Jays capped a 14-4 run with a three-pointer from Booker Woodfox, who was wide open on the wing and took a pass from P’Allen Stinnett. The three gave the Jays their first lead since an early 5-4 advantage; as Bowling Green called timeout to regroup, Creighton led 67-65 and suddenly, the negative guy was drowned out by 9,500 die-hard fans screaming and yelling.
For a couple of minutes, the game went back and forth, with the teams exchanging both baskets and the lead. And then with 1:40 left, Justin Carter nailed a three to give the Jays a lead they would not relinquish at 70-69. Stinnett hit two free throws on the next possession to run the lead out to 72-69; a defensive lapse led to an easy layup for Bowling Green and set up a tense final 30 seconds.
With the shotclock off and trailing by one, Bowling Green had to foul. They picked the freshman point guard, Antoine Young, and they chose well: he missed the front end of a one-and-one. Now with 28 seconds left, Bowling Green could hold for the winning shot, as they trailed just 72-71.
They had an open look early in the possession, however, and took it — fortunately for the Jays, Nate Miller’s shot clanged off the rim, and Kenton Walker grabbed a huge rebound. Walker was smacked in the head on the play and his contact lens popped out; ordinarily the refs will stop the game to allow re-insertion of a lost lens, and they did just that. Because of Walker’s poor free throw shooting percentage, the Jays bench employed a little gamesmanship and took advantage of the situation. After a two-second exchange with the coaches, suddenly the lens was torn, not just knocked out.
And just like that, the team’s leading free throw shooter, Booker Woodfox, popped up off the bench to shoot Walker’s free throws for him. Gamesmanship. You bet.
Of course, Booker missed the second free throw, making the entire situation moot. With 19 seconds left, Bowling Green had a second opportunity to hold for the last, game winning shot, or to hit a jumper to go to overtime.
All night long, dribble penetration had killed the Jays. But when it counted, Justin Carter sealed off the lane, forcing the ball-handler to kick it back out towards the perimeter. An awkward, off-balance, closely-guarded three bounced harmlessly off the rim as the horn sounded, and the Jays had survived.
You bet.
*****
And now its time for Kentucky. The winningest program in the history of college basketball, seven-time National Champion, and a program with unparalleled tradition. Its not the biggest game in Creighton history as some people very wrongly are claiming, and its not the biggest opponent to play in Omaha. But it is pretty cool, and I’m excited..