“This is the building No. 1 teams go to die evidently.” -Greg McDermott
Trailing 41-31 at the half, #1 Kansas scored the first nine points of the second half in a two-and-a-half minute burst. But they never took the lead, as Creighton had an immediate, emphatic response — a 10-0 run of their own, giving them a bigger lead heading into the first media timeout than they’d had at halftime, and completely erasing any momentum Kansas enjoyed coming out of the locker room.
Pop Isaacs hit three-pointers on back-to-back possessions, 23 seconds apart, then supercharged the electricity he’d created in the arena by yelling to the Bluejay faithful to get louder and waving his arms excitedly as he ran back on defense. And when KU coach Bill Self was T’d up during the ensuing timeout for arguing with the officials — part frustration about what he felt was a missed foul call a couple of possessions prior, part desperation about a game that was slipping away, part motivation to try and light a fire under his team — the decibel level at CHI Health Center was ear-splitting.
“The crowd was electric,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “They jumped on us to start the second half, but this crowd got us back in the game after that timeout, and they didn’t really sit down from that point forward.”
But KU chipped away, with three Bluejay turnovers directly leading to Jayhawk points in a stretch that saw them cut the lead to five, 58-53, with 11:02 to play. Then CU delivered the knockout blow. Their defense held Kansas to one point over the next three-and-a-half minutes, a 9-1 mini run that saw the Jays push their lead out to 13 at 67-54. It featured a huge three-pointer from Steven Ashworth and an alley-oop to Ryan Kalkbrenner.
Over the next six minutes, their defense held KU to just five points, and Creighton continued to pour it on in what was now an 18-6 run spanning nearly 10 minutes against the undefeated, top ranked team in the country. Mason Miller’s three at the end of the run gave the Jays a 76-59 lead — an unfathomable 17-point cushion! — with 1:53 to go. If you thought the noise was loud after Isaacs’ back-to-back threes, it was somehow even louder after this one. And a couple of minutes later, Bluejay fans stormed the court in celebration of toppling the top-ranked Jayhawks.
That Bluejay defense, rightfully maligned earlier in the season, put on a masterclass against Kansas in perfectly executing Greg McDermott’s gameplan. Simply put, he’d decided Hunter Dickinson was not going to beat the Jays in the paint, and Zeke Mayo was not going to do it from the perimeter. McDermott’s defensive plans often have a riverboat gambler quality to them, rolling the dice by shutting down an opponent’s top options and daring other players to beat them. Those plans have sometimes blown up in their face over the years, but when it works it’s maddeningly brilliant. On this night, his players shrunk the floor by collapsing on Dickinson and Mayo, and cheating off Dajuan Harris and KJ Adams.
It was a dare Harris was more than willing to take. He attempted a career-high 21 shots, making six (fully 30% of his team’s total shot attempts). Meanwhile, the All-American Dickinson found himself on the other end of the spectrum — he took a career-low two shot attempts inside the arc and scored just six points. As for Mayo? He had 12 points, all of them in the first half — he missed all five shots he took in a scoreless second half.
Kansas’ offense has been excellent so far this year at forcing opposing defenses to go over ball screens. When that happens, two defenders end up on the ball — and often times, it’s the point guard Harris with the ball, where he picks apart a scrambling defense and finds the open shooter. Creighton forced Kansas to face the flaw in that scheme, aggressively going under ball screens every time they encountered one. That left Harris open, instead of other, better shooters, and he took the bait.
Ashworth was his primary defender most of the night, and he did a fantastic job of goading Harris into taking the shots Creighton wanted him to take.
“He’s a really dynamic point guard. Throughout my career I’ve watched a lot of his games, and been really impressed with the way that he leads his team,” Ashworth said. “I knew he was going to be assertive, he was going to be aggressive, especially in his floater game. He takes a lot of those and gets to them efficiently. But just trying to navigate ball screens was a huge thing for me in that matchup. Kalk, Jackson, IT, Mason, all of our fours or fives, Jason as well, did a really good job of getting me through those ball screens.”
“Steven was in a help spot, where one of their bigs was out on the floor setting a ball screen or a handoff,” McDermott elaborated. “Our idea was to keep the other one back in the paint and try to plug things up, and try to make the entry passes that they probably took for granted a little more difficult.”
You’d have never known how banged up the Bluejays were, given how they controlled the game for nearly the entire evening. Kalkbrenner hadn’t practiced for a week with a lower-body injury and was a game time decision on whether he’d play at all. Isaacs was sick with the flu during their previous game against Notre Dame and still fighting off its’ lingering effects. Ashworth was sick with the flu during this game, and during second-half warmups made a beeline for a trash can behind the bench so he could throw up.
“I’ve never seen what’s going on with our team ever in my life,” McDermott said. “Some of the injuries and illnesses, and then being able to execute the way they did tonight with hardly any practice time is really a credit to our team and their mental preparation because we weren’t able to do a lot of physical preparation with several of the guys.”
In spite of all that, Creighton led wire-to-wire, scoring the game’s first points 15 seconds in and never looking back. Jamiya Neal made the first two baskets on driving layups, setting an aggressive tone from the get-go. On the very first possession, he got downhill and used a finger roll at the rim to score. And after back-to-back threes from Isaacs and Jackson McAndrew, a 10-2 Bluejay lead forced Bill Self into an early timeout.
“We executed well early, and we knew that if we could get stops we’d be able to have opportunities in transition,” Ashworth said on the postgame radio show. “Jamiya did a great job early getting out and running, and then Pop’s threes got the momentum going in this building.”
A second three by Isaacs, set up by an offensive rebound from McAndrew, made it 13-4.
And when Ashworth joined the three-point parade with this one taken from the beak of the Bluejay logo, it gave them a double-digit lead at 21-11.
They continued pouring it on, and the ball movement they showcased all night long was never more evident than on this alley-oop to Kalkbrenner — Ashworth flung a one-handed pass from halfcourt to Isaacs, who took two dribbles and then threw a fastball to Kalkbrenner at the rim for an uncontested dunk.
Another logo three from Ashworth — this one even longer than his previous shot from the tip of the beak — made it 33-22 Bluejays with just over four minutes left in the half.
Seconds later, Ashworth rewarded a sprinting Kalkbrenner with a long pass up court in transition, which Kalkbrenner turned into a dunk.
To control the game from opening tip to final buzzer against the #1 team in the country was a resounding answer to questions about this Jays team following an upset loss to Nebraska and two defeats in Las Vegas.
“We as a team felt like we let our community and our fans down with our last home game,” Ashworth said on the postgame radio show in a message directly to the Bluejay fanbase. “Everybody out there, listen, I can’t tell you guys enough how much it means to us to have you guys in this building every single night cheering us on. We feed off of your energy. To be able to have number one teams in the country come to our place, especially in a non conference game, it’s no accident. It’s because of the program that Creighton has built.”
Creighton went 14,588 days from Feb. 10, 1974 to Jan. 19, 2014 without a single win over a top ten team. Since Jan. 20, 2014 — the Ethan Wragge Game where they toppled #4 Villanova on the road — CU has 15 wins over top ten teams, including at least one in each of the last 10 seasons. Think about that.
And now they’ve knocked off the #1 team twice in 10 months, both times by double digits, becoming the first team to do that in the same calendar year since Oklahoma in 1990.
As Kevin Sarver put it afterward on X, wins like this “make me think of Don Leahy, Tony Barone, Doc Bevilacqua and Father Hart. Four great men who dreamed of this 35 years ago and didn’t get to experience it.”
What a night.
Inside the Box:
Kansas won all of the specialty stat categories: they had more points off turnovers (12-7), more points in the paint (28-26), more second-chance points (17-6), more fast break points (12-8), and more bench points (14-8).
But in spite of taking 17 more shots, Creighton’s defense held Kansas to the exact same number of made shots — 25. CU had four more made threes than the Jayhawks, and made nine more free throws, and so the Jays won the most important stat: the scoreboard.
Ryan Kalkbrenner played 38 minutes, scoring 17 points with 10 rebounds and a block. Defensively, he held Hunter Dickinson to six points and eight rebounds, and more importantly just four shot attempts inside the arc. In the much-hyped battle of two of the nation’s best big men, it was undoubtable who was the best on this night. Even more impressive? Creighton wasn’t even sure Kalkbrenner could play when they were going through their final warmups, and were prepared to alter their starting lineup at the last minute.
“We kind of had a plan of some stuff to do to get me to the point where I’d be able to play,” Kalkbrenner said. “But you know, that stuff started in motion like an hour and a half before game time, so it was really kind of up to how I responded to that stuff. I didn’t really know until I got out there and started warming up and it felt good.”
Steven Ashworth was battling twin ailments — the ankle he sprained 10 days ago, and the flu bug that’s been working its way through the team since their trip to Las Vegas. He, too, played 38 minutes despite near-constant nausea, and scored 17 points with eight rebounds and six assists. His defense on KU point guard Dajuan Harris was a key piece of the defensive puzzle, too. While Harris scored 15, he took 21 shots and made only six.
“Honestly, I didn’t know if Kalk was going to play when I came out of the tunnel three minutes before the game,” McDermott said. “They were waiting to see how he moved, how he responded to the treatment. Steven hasn’t practiced and then he’s throwing up on the bench when we come out of halftime with the flu. It’s crazy that those guys were able to perform at this level without any practice time. We’re lucky to have both of them.”
Also playing 38 minutes? Pop Isaacs, who scored a career-high 27 points on 10-of-15 shooting — including 6-of-9 from three-point range. He added seven rebounds and four assists, plus solid defense, in a complete effort.
“Pop and I talked during the recruiting process that if he’d commit to taking the right shots, his shooting percentages and his inefficiencies of last year will go away,” McDermott said. “He still takes a couple crazy ones once in a while, but for the most part he’s picking the spots and taking the right ones. When Pop takes the right ones, he’s not going to miss very often. He’s a really good shooter. He and Steven are so fast with the ball and they’re so fast with their cuts — and they need to be because they’re not very big. What they lack in size, they make up with heart and toughness, and how fast they move without the basketball.”
Turnovers continue to be an area that needs improvement — the Jays had 15, or one on 21.4% of their possessions. 11 of them were committed by Ashworth and Isaacs, their two primary ball handlers.
“We’ve got to cut the turnovers down, they know that,” McDermott said. “We’re giving teams eight to 10 extra possessions a game, and a lot of those turnovers are controllable. It’s us trying to just hit a home run instead of just making the simple play. So we’re going to clean that up moving forward. But those two, they’re always a threat and they never stop moving, which is very difficult.”
But Ashworth and Isaacs also combined for 10 assists and 44 of Creighton’s 76 points. So you take the good with the bad.
“They put a lot of pressure on the rim with some of their cuts,” McDermott said. “Kalk’s good at understanding when to step out and set a flare, when to set a pin, when to post, so he got those guys loose a lot. Those cuts to the basket collapse the defense and now some of our shooters were able to get loose.”
After dropping out of the AP Top 25 and falling to #53 in KenPom’s ratings, the win moved Creighton up 11 spots to #42 on KenPom. The jump was even more dramatic on the NCAA’s NET ranking — from #99 on Monday to #75 this morning. Most importantly, they now have a marquee Q1 win on their resume, and take some pressure off of themselves heading into the last two non-conference games.
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