Recap:
“Not like this.”
That’s what I remember saying in disbelief with 1.2 seconds left. Surely this season of unprecedented expectations, of crushing lows and exhilarating highs, of advancing further in March than any Creighton team who’d come before them…surely this season wouldn’t end like this, with their opponent shooting free throws with (virtually) no time on the clock in a tie game? How anticlimactic. How cruel.
In an instant, the season was over, the goal of a Final Four — a decade ago, something that would have required a miracle run to achieve, but now so tantalizingly close that Bluejays past and present could practically touch it — was ripped away.
There’s two sides to the madness of March. A year ago in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, San Diego State led for all but three minutes and 10 seconds, but lost when the Bluejays rallied from nine points down with two minutes to play. Now CU knows what the flip side feels like; in Sunday’s Elite Eight rematch, the Jays led for 29 minutes and for most of the second half, and SDSU rallied to win.
But about that foul call.
For 39 minutes and 58.8 seconds, it was a game of unbelievable physicality where 21 total fouls were called on the two teams. 15 free throws were attempted. Play after play, the whistle was swallowed as players pushed, shoved and jostled for position — including earlier in the second half when Ryan Nembhard’s wrist was injured by an SDSU player who got substantially more arm than ball while trying to rip away a steal. The officials’ decision on that play, which sent the Jays’ star to the bench? Play on. Rough, but it was consistent with how it had been called all day, and at the end of the day that’s all anyone wants from an officiating crew. If you know what to expect, you can adjust accordingly.
Then on the final shot attempt of the afternoon, that consistency went out the window as Nembhard was whistled for a hand check. A foul by the book. Not a foul in this game, not with the way it had been officiated for the first 39 minutes and 58.8 seconds. On the final play of a tie game with the Final Four on the line, calling a foul that hadn’t been a foul for the rest of the game is tough to reconcile.
Given the circumstances, that’s one of the softest foul calls you’ll ever see — a point ESPN’s Jay Williams emphatically made on Monday morning.
Former Villanova coach Jay Wright made the same point on CBS’s postgame coverage in a spirited discussion with Charles Barkley and Clark Kellogg.
“Airborne shooters were bumped the whole game in that game,” Wright said. “This is what Greg McDermott’s concerned with. ‘If you would have called that call the whole rest of the game when our guys are driving the ball or when their guys were driving the ball, I’m fine with that. But you didn’t.’ That’s what he’s going to say.”
As for what McDermott actually said, at least in public? Unsurprisingly for those who know him, he took the high road.
“Officiating is part of the game,” McDermott said. “We’re not going to go there. We lost a game because we didn’t do enough and San Diego State did.”
“I guess I pushed him in the back a little bit,” Nembhard told a group of reporters in the locker room. “We don’t blame officials. When we lose or when we win, we don’t make excuses. So we don’t have an excuse for none of that. I’m not going to make excuses.”
“I didn’t really have a good angle to see if that was a foul or anything,” Kalkbrenner added. “At the end of the day, the refs make the calls. I haven’t watched the replay or anything like that. And even if I did, I wouldn’t want to speak about the calls to the media.”
They’re right. And the foul wasn’t the reason Creighton’s season came to an end, anyway; this was death by a thousand cuts, not from one blow.
After trailing 5-4 in the early moments, CU used a 13-4 run to take a lead they’d hold for the majority of the game. Featuring back-to-back layups by Ryan Kalkbrenner, the highlight was this play from Nembhard where he literally took on the entire SDSU defense. Initially splitting a double-team off the dribble, he then fended off a pair of collapsing defenders trying to stop his dribble and another who fouled him at the rim while trying to block the shot. Incredible.
As they had all tournament, Creighton had an answer for every opponent’s run. After SDSU had cut the lead to 19-16, Baylor Scheierman answered with a three-pointer and Kalkbrenner added two more buckets at the rim. Just like that, their lead was back out to eight at 26-18 with 6:36 remaining in the first half.
And after the Aztecs went on a 10-2 run to tie the game at 28, the Jays had ANOTHER answer — this time on a short jumper from Scheierman and a three by Arthur Kaluma.
Leading 33-28 at the half, CU had played a solid 20 minutes of basketball where they took reasonable shots against SDSU’s aggressive, swarming defense, and their own defense held the Aztecs at arms length.
“A good shot in this game is different from a good shot against other teams,” Ryan Kalkbrenner told the World-Herald’s Joel Lorenzi after the game. “Other teams, you can pass up a good shot for a great shot. San Diego State, you just gotta take the good shot.”
Everyone expected the Aztecs to going to come out of the locker room and find another gear offensively; that’s what great veteran teams do in games like this. What no one expected was that they had another gear defensively, somewhere beyond the elite ball pressure they’d already displayed in the first half.
CU had committed just six turnovers in the first half; in the first four minutes of the second half alone, CU committed two. The full-court aggressiveness was so relentless and the ball-pressure so intense that the Jays were seemingly on the brink of turning it over every second they had the ball.
Creighton made just one of their first 10 shots after halftime. Those shots were all rushed — some taken a half-second too fast anticipating contact, some taken in desperation when nothing else was available. But even in the midst of that, they withstood the Aztecs’ 7-0 blitz out of the locker room that briefly gave them a lead, and answered with an 8-0 run of their own thanks to three free throws from Scheierman and this dunk from Kalkbrenner.
Ahead 41-34 with 13:14 to play after Kalkbrenner completed that three-point play, the Jays had a 77.5% chance of victory according to KenPom. They’d score just 15 points the rest of the day. And when Kalkbrenner was whistled for a flagrant foul at the 9:44 mark, it gave SDSU the spark it needed; two minutes later, they’d taken the lead for good on this floater from Darrion Trammell.
It set up a roller coaster final six minutes, where the teams traded haymakers — there were five ties in the final six minutes, though Creighton never again had the lead. First among the clutch shots? Trey Alexander tied it at 48 on this jumper:
Kaluma tied it at 50 on a pair of free throws. Kalkbrenner tied it at 52 on a layup at the rim, and then at 54 moments later on another layup. Alexander nearly tied it again at 56 on this floater in the lane, which touched every part of the rim before rolling out.
Ultimately, it was Scheierman who tied it in the most unbelievable way imaginable: with SDSU unable to get the ball inbounded, they threw the ball up for grabs. Scheierman corralled it under his own basket and laid in the game-tying shot.
“We just wanted to make the catch tough, and they weren’t bringing anybody else back,” Scheierman said of the play. “It was just me and that guy, and he was kind of posting me up yelling at the inbounder to throw it, throw it. As soon as he let it go, I knew he was throwing it deep, and so I just released and was able to beat him to the other side, and luckily he jumped and just whiffed totally, and it just dropped right in my arms, and I was able to lay it in and tie the game up.”
If the final 33 seconds had gone differently, it’s a play that would live in Bluejay history forever as one of the program’s finest moments, perhaps leading to a Final Four.
Alas.
Following the foul call, Trammell sank one of two free throws, Scheierman’s desperation baseball pass on the inbounds play was off target, and San Diego State — not Creighton — was heading to their first Final Four.
It’s going to take awhile to get over it.
Inside the Box Score:
The second half of this game featured so many back-breaking stats that it’s a wonder Creighton was in the game. SDSU turned eight offensive rebounds into 11 second-chance points. CU was 0-for-10 from three-point range and 8-of-19 inside the arc, including just 4-of-11 at the rim. Kalkbrenner alone missed four shots within 18 inches of the rim.
Those were shots they made in the first half; Kalkbrenner was perfect (4-of-4) on shots at the rim in the first half. Despite the shooting woes from three-point range, in a game decided by a single point it was all of those misses at the rim that were ultimately the difference.
The Jays were 10-of-11 at the free throw line in this one, and finished their four-game NCAA Tourney run by shooting 62-of-68 (91.1%) at the line. They finished the season shooting a school-record 78.3% from the free-throw line.
Individually, the final game of the season saw several Bluejays achieve milestones. Baylor Scheierman became CU’s first player to surpass 300 rebounds in a season since Benoit Benjamin in 1984-85. Ryan Nembhard tied Grant Gibbs for most assists by a Creighton sophomore in one season with 176. Ryan Kalkbrenner (1,167) moved past Ethan Wragge (1,155) and Dane Watts (1,152) on Creighton’s all-time scoring chart.
Some of the single-tournament program records that were set or tied in this NCAA Tournament include Baylor Scheierman for three-pointers made (10), and Ryan Kalkbrenner for points (80) and field goals made (32). As a team Creighton set single-NCAA Tournament program records for points (299), three-pointers made (25), blocked shots (14), and free throws made (62).
And they accomplished something no Creighton team has done in the modern era of college hoops: they won three games in a single NCAA Tournament, advancing to the Elite Eight. Though the final seconds felt like a gut-punch, there’s no realistic world where this season — for all its ups and downs — can be looked at as anything but successful.
McDermott’s words to a team of players holding back tears spoke for Jays fans everywhere.
“You have rallied and galvanized not a university, not a community, but anybody that’s ever had anything to do with Creighton University,” he told his team in the locker room, in a video their social media team posted. “They’ve all stopped their lives for the last couple Fridays and Sundays to watch you guys do what you do, and I couldn’t be more proud of the way you did it. That’s why we were able to climb a mountain nobody that’s ever worn this uniform has climbed.
We can hurt. We can be disappointed. But we damn well better be proud. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity to be your coach. I love every one of you everybody in this room. What happened out there is not renting a space in our head and our heart, because then we got to go through it over and over and over again. We went through it once and it’s over.
We’ll be back in this game, I promise you that.”
Highlights:
Press Conference: