With eleven minutes elapsed on Sunday, Nebraska led 23-22 after five straight points from fan favorite Keisei Tominaga that whipped the Pinnacle Bank Arena crowd into a frenzy. It looked like exactly the type of back-and-forth, tightly-contested game most predicted. And then Creighton ended the half on a 30-14 run spanning the final 8:54 after Tominaga’s transition layup had briefly given them the lead.
Through eight games their hallmark has been to tread water until they settle in against an opposing defense, and then bury them with a gigantic avalanche. It’s true that basketball is a game of runs, but these aren’t your run-of-the-mill string of points on four or five straight possessions. They’re dramatic game-changing swings lasting six or seven minutes, sometimes longer. To wit:
- Florida A&M, 19-2 run
- Iowa, 18-6 run
- NDSU, 26-5 run
- Texas Southern, 20-0 run
- Loyola Chicago, 21-4 run
- Oklahoma State, 17-0 run
- Nebraska, 30-14 run
Francisco Farabello got this one started with a three-pointer in the corner, created by Baylor Scheierman dribbling into the paint and collapsing the defense on him, then kicking it out to Farabello whose man had left him to provide help. It put the Jays ahead for good at 25-23. The next possession, Trey Alexander intercepted a pass and took it the length of the floor for a layup. And then Scheierman buried a pair of three-pointers 25 seconds apart, a 10-2 spurt that saw him score or assist on eight of the points.
With 1:19 left in the half, Scheierman hit his sixth — yes, sixth — three-pointer of the first half. Everyone in red inside the arena was shaking their heads in disbelief, everyone in blue was cackling maniacally, Scheierman was blowing kisses to Husker fans that had been heckling him earlier in the half, and CU had a double-digit lead. A glorious moment for the Bluejays all the way around.
As the half wound down they’d get another. Tominaga hit a three-pointer with three seconds left that cut the deficit to 11, seemingly sending Nebraska to the locker room with momentum after the big Bluejay run. But then as so often happens in this series, Nebraska shot themselves in the foot: Tominaga hurled the ball at the basket stanchion following a controversial foul call at the buzzer, earning a technical foul. Brice Williams left his feet on a pump fake by Steven Ashworth attempting a desperation three at the buzzer, and when Ashworth collided with him in midair Williams was whistled for the foul. Add in the technical, and Ashworth received five free throws. He made four, and instead of an 11 point deficit with momentum, Nebraska headed to the half down 15 as boos rained down from the crowd at the officials.
The Jays scored on five of their first nine possessions in the 2nd half, including a long contested three from Ashworth:
And this one from Mason Miller, which made it 65-43 Bluejays.
Impressively, they didn’t let up, instead building a lead as big as 31 points. From the moment Nebraska last led at 23-22, the Jays outscored them 67-37 the rest of the way. The exclamation point came on a hammer slam from Alexander, a poster dunk that epitomized Creighton’s effort all game.
With the win, Creighton’s metrics exploded. They’re now the #5 team in the country on KenPom, and were #4 in the first official NCAA NET rankings that came out Monday morning. Their adjusted offensive efficiency is 13th, and their adjusted defensive efficiency is 10th. At 7-1 with three non-conference gamed remaining, all of their goals are intact — and they now have two impressive true road wins under their belt.
“This is as good of an environment as you’re going to play in, and you know for us to come in and take the crowd out of the game with the way we played is a credit to our guys,” McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “You know, I’d like to tell you the win is really, really enjoyable. But I’m going to be honest, it’s just a relief because this game is so important to our fans. When you also look at what happens at the CHI when we play a home game and then this environment here today, like…basketball is alive and well in the state of Nebraska. There’s a lot of guys that grew up in our state that were on that floor today, and it makes it pretty cool that this rivalry is that important to both schools and that both fan bases support it so well.”
“It’s a lot of fun. This environment was crazy before tip-off. It was super loud,” Scheierman, a native of Aurora, said. “That’s what you dream of growing up and actually, you know, this was my first win in Pinnacle. I played here four years in high school and never won a game. So it was kind of fun to come in here and get the W.”
Isaac Traudt, a native of Grand Island, agreed. “It was unbelievable, whether they’re cheering for us or not. I mean the state of Nebraska is just the best. Being able to play in front of however many people this place sits, this was just a huge huge crowd, a great environment and definitely one of the most enjoyable games I’ve ever played in.”
Inside the Box:
Last year, Creighton shot 10-of-40 from three-point range and lost by 10. This year, they shot 14-of-40 from deep and won by 29. Four more shots doesn’t sound like a ton, though that is 12 more points. So what gives?
For one, their defense was really, really good.
“Our defense was terrific, especially the second half,” McDermott said. “We made a couple adjustments after the first seven or eight minutes and brought our bigs up a little bit more to the point of attack on the ball. We changes how we defended their screens and some of the pin downs on Tominaga, and I thought he saw blue every time he caught the basketball. We weren’t necessarily trying to keep it out of his hands, we just wanted him to be crowded when he caught it, and I thought our guys executed and we rotated Trey and Bello off him enough that a lot of good things happened defensively.”
McDermott said that their scout team did a fabulous job of studying and mimicking the Huskers’ sets. “There’s nothing that we saw today that surprised us. They ran Nebraska’s plays in practice, and when the game started they were calling out what play it was. That tells me they’re on their phones, they’re watching the plays, they’re looking at the scouting report, they’re taking it serious, they’re doing their homework. And that homework obviously paid off with our defensive effort today.”
They held a Nebraska team who came in with the 22nd best offense in the country according to KenPom’s data to just 0.83 points per possession. The Huskers were 2-of-22 from three-point range, and while it’s tempting to chalk that up to them having a poor shooting day, that’s not fair to the defensive scheme, plan, and execution of Creighton’s defense. Not only did the Jays run them off the line — the 22 attempts represented just 30% of their total shots, compared to 45% for the season as a whole — the shots they did get were mostly from players they’d rather not have taking them. Brice Williams had made 41.9% of his threes coming in, but attempted zero. But big man Rienk Mast, while capable, took five (and made one).
Scheierman’s work on Mast was an under-appreciated strategic move, because it allowed the Jays to keep Kalkbrenner closer to the rim guarding Josiah Allick. It’s a move they probably couldn’t have made a year ago, but Scheierman’s work on strength and conditioning over the summer have improved his lateral quickness enough to make him a much better defender.
“We decided to invert that matchup and and put Baylor on Reink Mast some, at least, to start the game. That disrupted their offense a little bit and it allowed us to keep Kalk more at the rim,” McDermott explained. “So much of their offense is Mast working out of the high post. Keeping Kalk back there really plugged things up. We talked about his shot blocking, but what the stat sheet doesn’t show are the shots that he changes or the shots that people don’t take because he’s there. That doesn’t show up in the box score but it screams at you on film when you watch it.”
And while the Jays’ shooting was good, it was hardly extraordinary. They shot 35.0% from three-point range, almost five percentage points worse than their season average (39.2%). They shot 46.4% overall, which was also worse than their average (49.5%).
Interestingly, last year’s team had virtually the same splits as this year. 25 of their 65 shots were two-pointers a year ago, and it was 29 of 69 this year. But while last year’s team made 10-of-25 on two-pointers and 8-of-15 at the rim, this year the Jays were 18-of-29 on twos and 15-of-19 at the rim.
There’s a lot of talk today about Creighton winning big because they had one of their hot-shooting days from long range. But the truth is they were good, not great, from outside. The numbers don’t lie: the real damage came in the paint and at the rim.
To that end, the Jays had not one but two players with double-doubles, as Baylor Scheierman (24 points, 10 rebounds) and Ryan Kalkbrenner (13 points, 12 boards) led the way. Five of Kalkbrenner’s boards were offensive, and he added three blocks, as well.
Scheierman has made three or more threes in all eight games this season, making him the first Bluejay ever to do that. He extended his school record by making a three for the 55th straight game — and in all 45 games he’s played as a Bluejay. He scored 20 or more first-half points for the second time in four games, after doing it against Loyola a week ago. And his 19 three-point attempts set a new school record.
Creighton’s won an awful lot of blowouts in this series over the last two decades, so it’s an eyebrow-raising stat that this one ties the largest margin of victory ever over Nebraska. But this was a rare case where they played all gas, no brakes for 40 minutes and never let the Huskers back into it. In other double-digit wins, and there’s been 12 of them since 2001, their biggest lead of the game came early and then they coasted home to victory. In this one, the biggest lead came in the final two minutes of the game, when the end of the bench was playing.
The last time CU beat Nebraska by this many, the series went on hiatus for 45 years. The Jays won 47-18 in Omaha on March 4, 1932, and three days later the teams played a rematch in Lincoln. But late in the second half with the Jays once again winning, the crowd at the N.U. Coliseum rushed onto the floor in a riot after a foul call on the Huskers and prevented the end of the game. Though technically incomplete, it went into the books as a 28-26 Creighton win.
The series won’t go on hiatus after this one, but it’s not been very competitive for awhile. Creighton’s 52-37 lead at the break was the ninth time in the last 25 regular-season meetings vs. Nebraska it has had a double-digit halftime lead; they’ve won 20 of those 25 games. Greg McDermott is now 11-3 against Nebraska since taking the CU job, and his 11 wins are now the most ever, breaking a tie with Dana Altman who beat them 10 times. His 17 total wins over Nebraska (including six at Iowa State) are second only to perennial Big East doormat DePaul, who he’s beaten 21 times. And Creighton is 4-1 all-time at Pinnacle Bank Arena and remains the only non-conference team with multiple wins there over the Cornhuskers.
