When Creighton and Nebraska meet Tuesday night in Lincoln, it will be an early-season test for two rosters rebuilt from a year ago with newcomers. CU has 10 players new to their program, and NU has eight. Both incoming classes are ranked in the top 15 nationally.
The Huskers do return three starters, but the bulk of their production through two games has come from a pair of players who were not in Lincoln a year ago — Arizona State transfer Alonzo Verge, Jr. and five-star freshman Bryce McGowens.
As you’d expect, then, both teams struggled during the season’s first week. Creighton escaped twice, rallying from down double-digits to beat Arkansas-Pine Bluff and grinding out a rock-fight against Kennesaw State. Nebraska wasn’t so fortunate, losing on the final possession to Western Illinois and then winning a back-and-forth affair against Sam Houston State.
It has all the trappings of a game destined to be close — KenPom predicts a one-point Nebraska win, and Vegas predicts NU by 2.5. That makes it all the more frustrating that the game is in Lincoln where a rowdy Pinnacle Bank Arena crowd could very well tip the scales in their favor, because this year’s game was scheduled to be in Omaha. You’ll recall that last year’s game was moved to Omaha (or rather, the series was paused, and a one-off game was played in Omaha instead) as a favor from McDermott’s program to Fred Hoiberg, who asked the Jays to consider moving the site of the game when faced with the prospect of playing his first game in the CU-NU series in front of hostile fans in Omaha, the second in an empty Pinnacle Bank Arena, then the third this year in another sold-out hostile arena in Omaha.
“I’d like to think he would do the same thing for us if the roles were reversed,” McDermott said last year before the game.
“We’re very appreciative to Coach Mac for changing up the schedule a little bit where we wouldn’t have played in an empty arena and then go back there with fans again,” Hoiberg said on Monday. “We’re really excited about this opportunity. We’ll learn a lot about ourselves in this game. They’re going to test us in a lot of ways. I’ve been very impressed with the young talent that that they got on their roster.”
A lot of Bluejay fans, myself included, wouldn’t have extended that courtesy especially knowing that this year’s team would be so young. But it is what it is, and this young group of Jays will play their first road game in front of what’s likely to be the most hostile environment they’ll face all season. The downside: the noise and hostility could prove too much to overcome and provide NU the spark they need to get a rare win in this series. The upside is regardless of the outcome, there won’t be anywhere else they play that will be less hospitable than PBA; the amount of vitriol, hate, and nastiness from the crowd will be a baptism by fire for these freshmen that will prove invaluable when they visit road venues in the Big East.
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Verge (36) and McGowens (31) have combined to take 67 of Nebraska’s 113 total shots so far — or 59.2%. The next closest player is McGowens’ older brother Trey, who’s taken 11 shots. To say the offense is top heavy is an understatement. Those two players are in control of the offense, and they operate in isolation an awful lot. As a team they’ve assisted on just 35.6% of their made baskets, ranking 303rd in D1. The D1 average through one week of the season is 50.4%; the D1 average for the full season a year ago was 51.8%. Nebraska was actually above that last season at 54.6%, ranking in the top 100.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s what happens when your top scorers are adept at creating their own offense and given the green light to do so. Zero of Verge’s made baskets inside the arc have come with an assist; just one of Bryce McGowens’ made shots inside the arc was credited with an assist to a teammate.
Small sample size applies to some extent, but two years at Arizona State offer quite a bit more data on Verge’s resume. And this is the type of player he is — a good scorer who dribbles an awful lot and is basically the textbook definition of inefficient. CU saw it up close two years ago in Tempe, when Verge shot 4-of-18 in 37 minutes of a loss to the Jays, dishing out zero assists while spending most of the night looking like he was auditioning for the Globetrotters with his dribble skills. Under the tutelage of Fred Hoiberg he has been a lot more of a distributor so far for Nebraska than he was for the Sun Devils, logging seven assists against Sam Houston State and five against Western Illinois. That’s fortunate because no one else has shown a penchant for passing the ball. He has 12 assists through two games; the entire rest of the roster has four combined.
Bryce McGowens shoots when the ball is in his hands, too, but when you’re as good as he is, you should. He’s a five-star recruit and has shown that pedigree to be accurate. He can score from everywhere (11-for-18 on twos, 61%; 5-of-13 on threes, 38.5%; 17-of-21 from the line, 81%). He’s averaging 27.0 points per game through two games, creating his own shots off the dribble thanks to length that lets him create space and poise that usually only comes from 20-30 games of D1 experience. Opponents are going to struggle to contain him all year. It’s a good bet that CU sticks Alex O’Connell on him to begin the game, but it’s an equally good bet that everyone on the floor will play a role in holding him in check. He’s already entered that rarified air where you know you’re not going to stop him entirely, so the goal is to hold him to his average and not let him go off for 40.
With those two getting so much attention, and rightfully so, it feels like a game ripe for someone unheralded to sneak up and hit three or four huge shots to energize the crowd and be the difference maker. Who is that player?
Second-year center Eduardo Andre seems like a good bet. In 15 minutes against Sam Houston State he had 11 points and seven boards, while blocking and challenging shots at the other end. At 6’11” with long arms and a bouncy first step, he has size no one else on the Husker roster has. And against a CU frontline that has been extremely up-and-down so far, he could have a big night.
Andre is also an X-factor because through two games, Nebraska has two total second-chance baskets. They’ve rebounded their own missed shot just 21.2% of the time, 287th in D1. That’s horrendous. Defensively, they’re orders of magnitude worse. They’ve cleared an opponent’s miss just 61% of the time, which is one of the worst rates you’ll ever see from a power conference team. Western Illinois grabbed 23 — yes, 23 — offensive rebounds representing 43.4% of their missed shots. They improved against Sam Houston State, but SHSU still grabbed 16, representing 34.8% of their misses, and that was after Hoiberg emphasized defensive rebounding in practice. Again, it’s a small sample size, but even if they improve that number by half they would still be a bottom-50 team in D1 in defensive rebound percentage.
That seems relevant against Creighton, who wants to play fast and run in transition. If the Jays can clear the glass and score points before Nebraska can set their defense, it could go a long ways toward helping an offense that has sputtered — and quiet the PBA crowd. Nothing silences a road crowd quicker than dunks in transition. Arthur Kaluma doing THIS on Tuesday in Lincoln is the stuff dreams are made of:
Based on where the roster is today, the Jays best chance at winning is probably to assume McGowens is going to score 25, but keep him from going off for 30+. Defend everyone else well, dominate the glass defensively so they can run in transition, crash the glass offensively for second-chance opportunities, and win as many 50/50 balls as they can. That’s not the recipe for a Bluejay win typically, but this group is bigger, longer, and more defensive-minded that the usual McDermott Era team. Strangely, the best avenue to a Creighton win lays in this game turning into a grinder played in the 60s and not a shootout where both teams score in the 70s or higher.
- Tip: 6:00pm
- Venue: Pinnacle Bank Arena, Lincoln, NE
- TV: FS1
- Announcers: Kevin Kugler and Nick Bahe
- In Omaha: Cox channel 78 (SD), 1078 (HD); CenturyLink Prism channel 620 (SD), 1620 (HD)
- Outside Omaha: FS1 Channel Finder
- Satellite: DirecTV channel 219, Dish Network channel 150
- Cable Cutters: Available on all major streaming platforms
- Streaming on the Fox Sports app and website
- Radio: 1620AM
- Announcers: John Bishop and Brody Deren
- Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
- Bryce McGowens joined rare company on Friday against Sam Houston with his 29-point effort. It tied for the second-highest performance by a freshman in school history and was the most since Shavon Shields also had 29 at Penn State in 2013. McGowens, whose 25-point effort against WIU set a record for a Husker freshman in his debut, became just the ninth freshman to post multiple 20-point efforts. Only Joe McCray (10, 2004-05), Jerry Fort (6, 1972-73) and Dave Hoppen (5, 1982-83) have more 20-point performances than McGowens.
- Alonzo Verge Jr. posted his first career double-double in Nebraska’s opener with 26 points, a career-high 13 rebounds and five assists against Western Illinois. Last year, only two Big Ten players had a game with at least 25 points, 10 rebounds and five assists – Illinois Ayo Dosunmu (vs. North Carolina A&T) and Purdue’s Trevion Williams (vs. Ohio State).
- NU’s roster features four players, including a pair of starters, from last season’s game in Omaha (Trey McGowens, Lat Mayen, Kobe Webster and Jace Piatkowski). Webster faced Creighton last year, and also when he was at Western Illinois in 2018-19, a game he posted his only career double-double with 24 points and 10 rebounds. In addition, transfers Alonzo Verge (ASU), C.J. Wilcher (Xavier) and Keon Edwards (DePaul) all faced the Bluejays at their previous schools.
- Creighton is 5-6 under Greg McDermott in its first true road game of the season, and 12-13 in the last 25 years in the initial road game. The road opener has been the barometer for Creighton’s postseason plans in the previous 13 years. Creighton has made the NCAA Tournament the five times it has won the road opener, and missed the NCAA Tournament six of the other seven years where a postseason was contested.
- Creighton has finished with more wins than Nebraska in 22 of the last 23 seasons since the 1998-99 campaign. Since the start of the 1998-99 season (including this winter), Creighton is 528-241, while Nebraska is 352-371 on the hardwood.
- Ryan Hawkins had 11 rebounds in his Creighton debut, then followed it up with 10 more caroms last Thursday vs. Kennesaw State. Hawkins is the first Creighton player with 10+ rebounds in each of CU’s first two games of the season since Doug Swenson did it to open the 1998-99 campaign. No Creighton player has had 10+ rebounds in the first three games of any season since Benoit Benjamin opened his junior campaign with 27 such consecutive contests.
Creighton leads the all-time series 28-26. As Creighton head coach, Greg McDermott owns a 9-2 record against Nebraska. He is the only Creighton men’s basketball coach to win seven straight games over the Cornhuskers (2011-17), and his nine overall victories trail only Dana Altman (who was 10-7 against NU) among Bluejay head coaches all-time.
McDermott owns a 15-4 record in his career against the Cornhuskers, tied with two other perennially struggling programs for his most wins against any opponent — DePaul (15-1) and Drake (15-7).
Creighton has led at halftime in 18 of the past 22 regular-season meetings (including 13 of the last 16 meetings), with eight double-digit leads at intermission in that span. Four of the five times that Creighton trailed at half, it came back to win the game anyway. Nebraska has led at halftime and beaten Creighton in the regular-season just once since Jan. 8, 1997, with that coming in December of 2018.
Also of note, Nebraska has scored more than 30 first half points in just three of the last 17 regular-season meetings at all sites.
On November 16, 2013 Creighton rallied to defeat St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia in front of a hostile Hagen Arena crowd. The Hawks took a double-digit lead; Creighton rallied thanks to seven 3-pointers from Ethan Wragge. From the Morning After:
“It never occurred to me before, but it’s true. Doug McDermott — two-time All American, leading scorer in school history, holder of a huge chunk of Creighton’s records — had never made a game-winning shot. That’s insane, right? On Saturday night, he finally won a game with a last-second shot, and what a time to do it.
Trailing 79-78, the Jays had to inbound the ball four times (!) — on the first, they couldn’t get it in and called timeout; on the second and third, they were fouled because St. Joe’s had fouls to give, and on the fourth, they got it to McDermott. They ran a circle play, one of the most basic basketball plays in the book, and it created just enough confusion to get McDermott open for a split second. That was enough for Gibbs to hit him, and McDermott nailed the shot while being fouled mid-flight — his jumper put them up by one, and the free-throw put them up two.
“We ran our circle out of bounds play that we talked about on the pregame,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show, “and you’d have thought I was crazy if I had said we were going to win a game with that play. I thought of it a couple nights ago when I was having one of those sleepless nights, to use against their switching defense. Coach Vanderloo informs me that his fifth grade daughter’s basketball team is running the same play, so yes it’s basic, but it was just able to create just enough confusion.”
The Bottom Line:
This has all the makings of a close game, and you’d normally favor either the more experienced squad or the one playing at home in that type of game. That feels like the case here. But I’ve never predicted a Nebraska win in this series and I’m not starting now.
Jays 69, Nebraska 65