With 13:21 to play, Creighton had taken a 55-44 lead after a dunk by Jasen Green. A little over three minutes later, Marquette had ripped off a 12-0 run to take the lead, capped by a three from Kam Jones that made the over-capacity crowd at CHI Health Center Omaha uneasy — and understandably so. Jays fans had seen this movie time after time against the Golden Eagles in this building.
In 2023, they blew an eight-point second half lead and lost 73-71. In 2020, they blew a nine-point second half lead and lost 89-84. In 2019 they had the ball leading 85-82 with 0.8 seconds and found a way to lose, a seemingly impossible thing to do given the circumstances; they lost 106-104 in overtime. In 2018, they blew a 16-point lead and lost 90-86. And on and on.
Point being: Marquette had done exactly this in Omaha WAY too many times. But they hadn’t done it on Jamiya Neal’s watch, and after he put the team on his back to carry them across the finish line, they didn’t add ’2025’ to that list.
Checking back in with three fouls at the 10:04 mark, he wasted no time getting to work. 12 seconds after re-entering the game he hit a three to end the run and put CU back ahead 58-56. A minute later he grabbed a rebound, raced down the floor, and scored again along the baseline to make it 60-56.
Then he committed his fourth foul with 8:34 left, and headed to the bench for another four minutes. In the meantime, Marquette re-took the lead with five straight points from David Joplin. Fedor Zugic answered by finishing a tough drive with a shot fake and layup, then used the same move again in transition to earn a trip to the free throw line, where he went 2-for-2.
Ahead 64-63 at the under-four timeout, Greg McDermott drew up a play to get a shot for Steven Ashworth. Marquette recognized it and stopped him from getting the ball. With the initial action broken, Neal — who’d just re-entered the game with four fouls — improvised. He put his head down, barreled into the paint, and collapsed the defense. Then he kicked the ball out to a wide-open Ryan Kalkbrenner, who calmly sank a three-pointer.
“He works on those a lot,” McDermott said. “He did in the off season as well, to prepare himself for the season in the future, and to hit it at that moment, I think, speaks to his growth. He’s not feeling good at all, and for him to play as many minutes as he did and hit a shot like that in that situation is pretty incredible.”
Then after Kam Jones hit a jumper to keep Marquette close at 67-65, Neal answered with a step-back three, a cold-blooded shot that touched nothing but net.
Jamiya Neal step back three 👌
Creighton 70, Marquette 65
📺 FOX#GoJays x @jamiyaneal_ pic.twitter.com/nKEHmrA2fn
— Creighton Men’s Basketball (@BluejayMBB) February 8, 2025
And when Jones hit another layup, cutting the lead to 70-67, Neal answered again, this time driving to the rim and scoring through contact. And then he cleared a defensive rebound on Marquette’s next shot — no easy task on this day — and Ashworth put the Golden Eagles to bed. Literally.
Steven SPLASHworth 💦 @stevenAsh_15 x @BluejayMBB pic.twitter.com/eowOjjBmF3
— FOX College Hoops (@CBBonFOX) February 8, 2025
“I would say the good thing about being on the bench is you get to watch the game from a different perspective,” Neal said on the postgame radio show. “So being on the bench, I knew exactly what I needed to do when I came in the game. It looked like we were losing life a little bit, so I said to myself, ‘Okay, as a senior on this team, as a leader, as one of the guys that the young guys look up to, I have to go in and do something.’ Whatever it was…getting stops, getting blocks, getting rebounds, or scoring, just give us some life. I knew as soon as we scored one time it would be electric in here.”
McDermott applauded the grit that his team showed in finding a way to win and answering repeated haymakers from Marquette. “In a weird kind of way, Jamiya’s foul trouble probably gave him that a little bit of extra energy that nobody else on the floor had,” McDermott said. “We’re really tired (from road trips to Villanova and Providence). And Kalk’s really sick and Steven’s been fighting an illness, a couple other guys have been under the weather. This was just a gutted-out gritted-out win, and this crowd the last seven minutes — they wouldn’t let us lose. I mean, they got on their feet and they stayed there. I’ve never heard as loud of an ovation for a rebound as I did tonight when Isaac pulled that one down after they had like eight or nine offensive rebounds in a row.”
“The fans are rabid. They support their Bluejays,” Marquette coach Shaka Smart said. “I always felt like the connection between the players on the court and the fans, that distinguishes the hardest places to play from everywhere else, and Creighton has that here.”
All totaled, Neal scored, assisted or otherwise directly contributed to (via defensive rebounds that created the possession) 16 of the Jays’ final 22 points from the 10:04 mark on. The only ones he didn’t have a hand in? Zugic’s four points scored when he subbed in for Neal after picking up his fourth foul, and a pair of free throws by Ashworth to seal the win with 33 seconds left.
The “Jamiya Neal Game”? It was going to be hard to unseat his career high 24-point performance at UConn for that name, but after (literally) willing his team to victory against the 11th-ranked Golden Eagles — activating “We Ain’t Losing Mode”, as WBR’s Matt DeMarinis said on Twitter — he did it. Here’s a supercut of Neal carrying them to the win:
Due to foul trouble in the second half, Jamiya Neal played on just 9 of Creighton’s last 16 possessions against Marquette this afternoon.
The #Jays scored on 7 of the 9 trips, which featured 4 buckets and an assist by Neal.
We Ain’t Losing Mode: pic.twitter.com/TXGGXanQMi
— 𝓜𝓪𝓽𝓽 𝓓𝓮𝓜𝓪𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓲𝓼 (@mjdemarinis) February 9, 2025
While Neal was the closer, Kalkbrenner dominated the game early on, making his first five shots. He scored 12 of Creighton’s first 18 points as they built an early lead. Among them was this ridiculous play where Jasen Green cleared a defensive rebound, passed it to Ashworth who took one dribble and threw a baseball pass 50 feet ahead to Neal, who then threw a lob to Kalkbrenner at the rim for a dunk. Five seconds, four Bluejays touching the ball, two points.
NEAL TO KALKBRENNER 😲
Creighton 11, Marquette 6
📺 @FOX#GoJays pic.twitter.com/kLpuUTjSIl
— Creighton Men’s Basketball (@BluejayMBB) February 8, 2025
And when Marquette adjusted to swarm Kalkbrenner with bodies, Ashworth carried them late in the first half, scoring eight of his 14 first-half points over the final five minutes. Early in the second, he helped them keep their foot on the gas, sinking a three-pointer on their first possession and assisting on another to Jackson McAndrew as the Jays took an 11-point lead, 49-38, at the 18:51 mark.
Marquette’s 12-0 run featured seven points from Kam Jones, who scored 27 points for the day. But he missed two of his last three shots in the final stretch of the game when Neal was carrying CU to victory at the other end. And with Kalkbrenner and Ashworth hitting threes in the closing salvo, accounting for three Bluejays clicking offensively proved too much for Marquette’s defense.
“Kalkbrenner’s awesome,” Smart said. “I’ll be sending him a graduation present when he finally leaves. But Ashworth makes Kalkbrenner so much better with his passing and with his cutting and his ability to use ball screens, because what happens is he gets you behind, and then now Kalkbrenner’s sprinting to the rim. He already was bigger than the guy we had on him, but now if we end up having to switch because we’re behind on Ashworth, now he’s even bigger…So Ashworth, to me, was the MVP of the game because he orchestrates their offense.”
The win is Creighton’s ninth-straight in conference, a school record in the Big East era. It moved them to a season-best 32nd in the NET rankings, as they’re one of 11 schools with five Quad 1 wins AND five road wins, joining Auburn, Arizona, Purdue, Alabama, Texas Tech, Mississippi State, Marquette, Duke, Michigan and Memphis.
Interestingly, last year’s team was 17-7 and 8-5 in the league through 24 games en route to a 3-seed in the NCAA Tournament and a Sweet 16 berth. This year they’re 18-6 overall and 11-2 in the Big East at the same point. Obviously the overall resumes differ, but what a remarkable turnaround this is.
Inside the Box:
In the Jays’ 79-71 loss to Marquette five weeks ago, Steven Ashworth and Ryan Kalkbrenner combined to score 29 points. Kalkbrenner was 4-of-11 from the floor, all on two-pointers, while Ashworth was 1-of-13 from three. Both missed shots when the Jays had an opportunity to try to steal a road win late in the game.
They started the rematch 10-of-13 from the floor with 26 points in the first half. And though Marquette shut them down somewhat in the second, they still combined for 15 points on 5-of-7 shooting.
Speaking of the first meeting, Jamiya Neal was also in foul trouble in that one — and Marquette was able to flip the game quicker than the Jays could get him back on the floor. Neal picked up his second foul at the 2:44 mark of that one, with the Jays ahead by eight. Within 90 seconds the lead was gone, and a 12-0 run to end the half gave the Golden Eagles the lead. Though Neal scored 11 second-half points, the hole that had been dug in his absence was too big to climb out of.
Creighton didn’t make the same mistake twice, getting Neal back into this one before it got away from them. And though he had to take a second prolonged break after picking up a fourth foul, Fedor Zugic was there in a way he wasn’t capable of in the first meeting. He scored six points, four of them in the crucial stretch between the 8:34 mark when Neal picked up his fourth foul and the under-four timeout when he returned. Zugic kept the Jays afloat and in the game when everyone else was struggling to score.
“Five weeks ago, I couldn’t play him in this game,” McDermott said. “I put him in twice, and he turned it over (both times). He had obviously just become eligible. But I think it speaks to his growth and how much more comfortable he feels, not just on the offensive end, but what he’s doing on the defensive end. We really needed him. Fedor has grown. He’s getting better. He was out there during the Providence game because he was defending well and making good decisions with the basketball. Obviously, we’re becoming more confident in him because of what he’s doing on a daily basis, and probably most importantly I think it gives him a little confidence in himself as he tries to figure this out at the record whirlwind pace that he’s trying to learn everything.”
Defensively, Creighton was really, really good. 28 of Marquette’s 67 points came either in transition or on second-chance opportunities. As we wrote in the Primer, the Golden Eagles are deadly in those areas but very average in the halfcourt — and CU held them to 39 points out of their halfcourt offense. Key to that was their gamble on Stevie Mitchell paying off. He came into the game averaging 11.2 points and shooting 32.1% from three, though he’d been at 50.0% from distance in non-conference games. Creighton left him open and dared him to shoot. He was 4-of-14 overall and 2-of-10 from three.
Marquette’s offense, often featuring five perimeters, can invert your defense by pulling your primary shot blocker away from the rim. The other option is to leave your shot blocker in place and not guard someone.
“That is the only way we can keep the integrity of what we’re trying to do defensively, is have somebody we don’t guard,” McDermott said. “It’s hard to do with Marquette because Stevie’s a good player. On the other hand, it really negates what he does because he wants to drive you, he wants to offensive rebound. He’s not gonna drive on Kalk and score at the rim, and he’s not gonna get an offensive rebound against Kalk. So as long as the three-point shooting doesn’t get upside down on us, it’s worth the risk.”
Marquette started 5-of-7 from three, with Mitchell and David Joplin combining to make 4-of-5. CU could have panicked and blew up their gameplan — but they stuck with it, and those two made just 2-of-15 the rest of the day.
And while Marquette grabbed an infuriating number of offensive rebounds — 18, or one on 39.1% of their missed shots — they only converted them into 11 points. But there’s no explaining it away; giving up an offensive board on 39% of missed shots is atrocious. It’s the Jays’ second worst number of the season (Texas A&M grabbed a rebound on 44.7% of their missed shots in a November win) and worst in Big East play.
“Oftentimes, when you get up an offensive rebound, you hang your head. But we didn’t quit when that happened. We kept defending, we kept working,” McDermott said. “And while it seemed like it was happening too often — which it was — they spread you out. They’re a hard team to block out for us because their bigs are away from the basket, and we had some size mismatches that were very really difficult for us.”
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