Creighton Basketball Insights and Humor by Keith Spillett

12/22/2025

In League With Creighton Week 7: The "Almost Arrested in Omaha" Edition

It was 3:00 AM on Saturday, and my eyeballs were pinned to the top of my forehead. I’d been staring at the ceiling since ten. I hadn’t slept in days. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Creighton-Xavier game from a few nights earlier.

Who was this Creighton team? How had a pusillanimous collection of finesse players, seemingly stuck in neutral for over a month, suddenly become a well-oiled offensive machine? They beat Xavier by 41 in Cincinnati.  In fairness, this is a rebuilding year for the Musketeers, but Creighton looked... different. The sets were crisp. They looked faster. Shots were falling from everywhere. Austin Swartz—a Miami transfer previously regarded as a late-game "bucket brigade" acolyte—had graduated to primetime scorer, dropping 27 on a perplexed Xavier squad.

Alexandre Dumas must have been thinking of Xavier’s defense when he penned The Three Musketeers, because it felt like they were playing with only three men on the floor all night long.  Creighton scored inside, outside, in transition, during timeouts, and likely on the plane ride back to Nebraska. For basketball’s version of eternity, the Musketeers—better known these days as the Mouseketeers—slumped in sadness, beset on all sides by Blue Jays having career nights.

The insomnia was fueled by a haunting question: Had I misjudged this Creighton team? I’d watched them for ten games and never seen a pulse. After three straight columns filled with bile and recrimination, I decided I had to make sense of the situation.

I told my wife I was going out for milk. There aren’t many all-night supermarkets left in Atlanta, but she was tired enough to believe me. I hit the road at 3:22 AM. I was in Omaha by 2:27 PM that afternoon.

The trip is supposed to take 14 hours, but I’ve found that on an empty stretch of late night highway, you can push a 2001 Hyundai Elantra to 140 miles per hour. People talk about self-driving cars being the "future," but my 24-year-old sedan has its own version of a DIY autopilot: if you keep your foot on the gas and the wheel between your knees, you can nod off for nearly an hour before the blaring horn of a passing semi wakes you up. The only real issue is my Restless Leg Syndrome; my speed tends to oscillate between 90 and 140 mph depending on how often I twitch in my sleep.

Is it safe? No. But they say driving tired is a leading cause of fatalities, so nodding off for a nap at triple-digit speeds felt like the responsible choice. It reminded me of a friend who, after being arrested for a DUI, told the judge he only drove because he was "too drunk to walk home." Sometimes, illogic is the only thing that makes sense.

Between switching license plates at every state line—an old habit from a previous career—and taking the occasional roadside "hygiene break," I made it to Omaha with time to spare. They were playing Marquette, coached by Shaka Smart, one of the best defensive minds in the country. Surely, the Jays wouldn't run riot on a Smart defense.

Marquette started the game by putting the clamps on Creighton: 7-0 early. I thought I was witnessing another massacre like the "Battle of Nebraska" from weeks prior. I was wrong. The team that demolished Xavier returned in full force at the 15-minute mark and never looked back.

Nik Graves, whom I had previously described as being about as useful as mammary glands on a boar hog, could not miss. He finished with a game-high 17 points. Between this and the Xavier game, Graves only missed three shots all week—a far cry from the "0-fer" nightmares of November and early December.

With Owen Freeman’s minutes limited, the Jays had been exposed in the paint, but Jasen Green (8 points, 8 boards) has transformed into a ten-ton hammer around the rim. Isaac Traudt, (14 points, 5 rebounds) who seemed allergic to the paint early in the season, also chipped in inside, proving he’s more than just "the tall guy who takes too many threes." Along with Swartz, these two are the primary catalysts for Creighton's sudden evolution.

At the half, Creighton led 46-32. Greg McDermott is a remarkable coach, largely because of his preternatural knack for adapting to his personnel. In the past, he’s leaned on a tight 7 or 8-man rotation. This year, he’s embraced his bench, making more adjustments than an eight-armed chiropractor. Without a singular force like Ryan Kalkbrenner in the middle, he has discovered a "Kalk-by-committee" approach that has turned a glaring weakness into a strength.

When Blake Harper banked in a layup with ten minutes left to make it 71-49, I decided I’d seen enough. While Marquette and Xavier are both having down years, this Blue Jay team has found itself just in time for conference play. I decided to leave early to beat the notorious Omaha traffic.

On my way out, I saw a heavy-set man with a white beard in a Santa suit mobbed by children. I pushed several toddlers aside, grabbed his hand, and looked him in the eye.

"Thank you," I said, sounding starstruck. "Thank you so much for getting me the Nintendo game Kung Fu for Christmas when I was eleven. It meant the world to me."

He gave me a jolly, nervous smile. "Of course! Glad to have made your Christmas special," he said, edging away with visible concern.

I realized then that the man was a fraud. I never got Kung Fu for Christmas. I never even owned a Nintendo. This man was a fake—an imposter.

I marched over to stadium security and demanded his immediate arrest for impersonating St. Nick. When security balked, I told them if they weren’t going to keep the kids safe, I would have to.  The guard began nervously fingering his taser as I spun around and screamed: "THIS MAN IS A LIAR! HE’S NOT THE REAL SANTA CLAUS!"

The children were stunned. Several began to cry. As the guard tried to grab me, I remembered I had several outstanding warrants in the state of Nebraska and decided it was time to go. I bolted through a back staircase, found the Hyundai, and tore out of the lot.

Driving back through St. Louis, I reflected on the episode. All year, Creighton had fooled me, just like that Santa had fooled those dumb little kids. Or maybe the Creighton I watched the last two games is the illusion. Maybe that imposter was the real Santa—after all, he delivers billions of gifts; it is unreasonable to expect him to remember one specific cartridge from 39 years ago.  Who knows what’s real and what isn’t anymore?

After 30 hours on the road, I can no longer tell the mirage from the desert. But I walked away with a valuable lesson: Don't believe anything you see. Ever.

12/14/2025

In League With Creighton Week 6:  Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid Edition

“What transpired in the first half is unacceptable.  It’s embarrassing.”

-Greg McDermott 

Yeah.  What he said.

They showed some fight in the second half and made it a compelling game, but these are dark days in Omaha.  There were some positives.  They held the nation’s leading scorer PJ Haggerty to 10 points.  They only missed one free throw.  There was not an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in the arena during the game.  No one on the roster spontaneously burst into flames. Beyond that, it’s hard to find much solace.

Kansas State 83 Creighton 76.  Onto Cincinnati.  

12/7/2025

In League With Creighton Week 5:  Team From an Imaginary Western

After Creighton’ 20-point-win against Nicholls State on Tuesday night, I had an idea for an absolute corker of a column.  They had a big in-state rivalry game against Nebraska on Sunday night and I was feeling good about their chances.  Sure, they only beat a winless team from the Southland Conference by 20 points, but Nicholls was a scrappy bunch who has hung in most of their games this year without a lot to show for it.  The important thing was the offense was looking smooth, efficient and refined and the Jays looked like they were starting to shake off a rough start and develop into the Big East contender that I know they are.  

I was so sure of this, I dreamed up what I thought was a perfect narrative arc for this column.  When Creighton played Nebraska last year, the Cornhuskers beat them soundly.  I had watched the Clint Eastwood film “Unforgiven” on late night television earlier this week and it clicked.  Write a column about Creighton that parallels the story of Eastwood’s character William Munny as he gets his swagger back after a series of setbacks and rides back into town in the film’s climax to get his revenge on Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (played masterfully by Gene Hackman in one of his greatest performances).  

In the column, Nebraska was going to play Hackman’s swaggering tyrant of a sheriff who beats and humiliates Munny, a British cowboy legend named English Bob and anyone else who rides into town with the notion of running wild in the sleepy hamlet of Big Whiskey to claim a thousand dollar bounty for killing two cowboys who did grievous bodily harm to a woman in the town.

Creighton took a beating last year, but they regrouped, got their mojo back and rode into Lincoln, Nebraska to vanquish Nebraska and regain their rightful place as the Kings of Nebrasketball.  That was the story.  I was going to throw in a whole bunch of references to Westerns to punch it up.  Stuff like “the loser of the game would be on the 3:10 to Yuma” and “some of the possessions were good, some were bad and some were just plain ugly” to describe how Creighton’s improving defense shut down Nebraska’s impressive offense.  But, that didn’t happen.

The game tipped off at 5:30 on Sunday night.  By 5:36, my paean to Westerns and the glory of Creighton basketball was apropos of nothing.  Eight and a half minutes into the game Creighton was trailing 15-2 and Nebraska had taken complete control. 

Fred Hoiberg has really put together a fantastic squad this year. This team is undefeated and flat-out filthy on defense.  They score at a deliberate pace, throwing an array of screens and cuts at defenses, whipping the ball around the perimeter and getting pretty much any shot they want late in the possession.  A lot of those shots end up getting taken by fifth year Senior Rienk Mast, who has spent the duration of his college career tormenting teams I really like, first at Bradley for three years in the Missouri Valley, now at Nebraska for two.  He’s a 6 '10 monster who scores from everywhere, including from beyond the arc where he is cashing in at an ungodly 45 percent for the season.  He's a potential sleeper for Big Ten Player of the Year.

Creighton did what they could, but Nebraska had gotten in everyone’s head and the whole team seemed off.  The exception being Miami transfer Austin Swartz, who is becoming a more significant part of the team each week.  He finished with 16 points, which is hardly going to get him shortlisted for Naismith Player of the Year, but when the rest of the roster only accounts for 34 points, it’s at least noteworthy.

“Unforgiven” is one of the better revisionist Westerns ever made.  One that seizes on the expectations and beliefs of the audience and subverts their moral compass in a way that makes it next to impossible to figure out who you are supposed to be rooting for.  For all of its ethical sleight-of-hand, the movie really wouldn’t have worked if Eastwood’s character Munny went to Big Whiskey the first time and got beaten bloody and crawled out of town only to rebuild his confidence, find his inebriated inner warrior and show up at the same bar just to take an even worse pummeling from Lil Bill and the gang.  Imagine watching the climactic sequence in Rocky 2, but instead of the epic memorable final fight sequence the Italian Stallion got knocked out in 63 seconds by a thunderous right hook from Apollo Creed.  No audience wants that film. I had nothing.

My motto as a responsible member of the journalistic community is to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.  In this case, I didn’t even feel good about pretending that Creighton was on some heroic redemption trip.  I thought about writing a revisionist version of the events in the game where Creighton won some sort of pyrrhic victory, but there wasn’t even enough to make that work.  It just wasn’t a memorable game.

Instead of actually paying attention like I was supposed to, I spent most of the second half meditating on the genius of Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”.  It becomes a much more interesting movie when you realize that the film manages to get the audience to identify with a guy who killed more people than the Black Plague as a mercenary over a sheriff, who goes a little overboard with his sadistic take on law and order, but seems to genuinely be trying to keep the peace in a quiet Wyoming town.  The film seems to beg the question: when did audiences start to relate to a guy who massacres an entire town on a drunken bender over a sheriff who is trying to keep people safe from an onslaught of ruthless, money crazed marauders?  

I started nodding off in the last ten minutes but from what I remember Nebraska closed out Creighton 71-50.  The initially enthusiastic crowd spent the final 20 minutes checking their phones for crop reports and cringe memes. The banality of weevils. There was tumbleweed rolling through the court during media timeouts, the place felt like a mortuary parlor.

The only part of "Unforgiven" that seemed to connect with the game in any meaningful way was a the sequence when English Bob says that he had heard Little Bill’s absence from the rougher parts of the West were due to the fact that he had fallen off his horse drunk and broke his neck. Hackett, with his trademark sarcastic grin, fires back, “I heard that one myself, Bob.  Hell, I even thought I was dead.  It just turns out I was in Nebraska.”

11/29/2025

In League With Creighton Week 4   

The Blue Jays rolled into Vegas this week for the Players Era filled with trepidation having learned they had lost sophomore Jackson McAndrew for the year to a foot injury.  McAndrew, who set a Creighton record for most three point baskets by a freshman, looked like he was going to be the centerpiece of the team this season.  Losing Kalkbrenner, Jamiya Neal and Steven Ashworth was already going to be a challenge, but losing McAndrew right before an early season tournament absolutely stacked with talent did not bode well for Coach McDermott and the crew.

Monday they were faced with the pure athletic freakishness of Baylor.  While this is not the Baylor team that won a title a few years back, they are still disgustingly talented.  I’m halfway convinced the agricultural program at Baylor grows genetically modified players who are all between 6 foot 9 and 7 foot 2, have the wingspan of California Condors, pogo sticks for legs and attack the basket with the speed and strength of ants.  Early on, Baylor resembled Clubber Lang in the montage in Rocky III where Mr. T pummels an array of fighters into drooling oblivion on his way to his initial triumph over Balboa.  Had it not been for the arrival of freshman Hudson Greer, the Jays might have gotten knocked out early.  Greer made it practically impossible for Coach McDermott to take him off the floor finishing with 16 points on 7-8 shooting from the field in 23 huge minutes in only his second college game. Creighton hung around and kept it interesting on the strength of some nifty three point buckets, but getting outrebounded 45 to 28 is not often a recipe for success. Baylor closed them out 81-74, never relinquishing the lead for the entirety of the game.

On Tuesday they ran into an Iowa State team who had upset St. John’s the night before and were flying high on Red Bull and adrenaline.  TJ Otzleberger’s team plays what I’d refer to as a “taking a friend to the prom” style of defense.  There is simply no chance of any penetration. They push teams so far from the basket that they can’t even see it, and spend the duration of the shot clock taking away any hope of a good angle to the basket.  Creighton ended far too many possessions by heaving up looks from just inside the logo after 29 seconds of probing for anything that resembled a passing or driving lane.  Josh Dix and Jasen Green were able to make some impressive shots and both finished with 15 hard earned points, but the duo Blake Harper and Nik Graves went a combined 0-13 from the field, overwhelmed by the ferocity of the Cyclones.  The Vegas bloodbath mercifully ended with Iowa State ahead 78-60 and Creighton skulking out of the building looking like a roulette player who just lost his kids’ entire college tuition and the dog food money by betting the lot on Black 13.

Wednesday saw a matchup against an Oregon team also struggling to find its way.  Oldheads like myself were intrigued by the idea of former Creighton coach Dana Altman matching up against his former squad.  But, the players, most of whom were in short pants watching episodes of Calliou the last time Altman walked the sidelines in Omaha, viewed this as a matchup of two teams trying to get it together after back-to-back schellackings.  Creighton bounced back nicely, establishing a nice offensive flow and making some key defensive stops.  Blake Harper led the way with a stellar 18 point 9 rebound performance that atoned for his 40 minute stay in the witness protection program the previous night.  Owen “The Moline Mauler” Freeman asserted much needed physicality in the paint tallying 14 points and 7 boards in 17 minutes.  He adds an element of toughness to a team that tends to be more comfortable with finesse over pure, blunt force basketball.  Creighton ran the lead to 15 at the half and closed the Ducks out 76-66 salvaging a nice win to close out a tournament they’d likely rather forget.  Hopefully, what happened in Vegas stays in Vegas.   The Jays face a winless Nichols State team next week before their annual Battle for Nebraska Sunday against the undefeated Cornhuskers.

11/20/2025

In League With Creighton Week 3 (Infectious Jelquing Nuclear Slam Division Remix)

(The following column is an attempt to create a written experience that replicates the sheer visceral horror I experienced listening to Infectious Jelquing’s new heavy metal disasterpiece "Nuclear Slam Division”)

Creighton, William Butler Yates, and Slam Metal don’t have much to do with each other. However, Creighton played Maryland Eastern Shore and North Dakota this week, and I can’t possibly expect more than a handful of people to care. Creighton won.  Both games.  By a lot of points.  They put the round ball in the metal cylinder more times than the other guys.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Slam metal is a subgenre of a subgenre of heavy metal.  This is the musical equivalent of being suburb of a suburb of Boise, Idaho.  It’s basically brutal death metal (itself an offshoot of plain old death metal), played badly by kids dressed like they are about 15 years late to the Houston Codinecore rap thing from a while back (“Sypin on Some Scizzor” type stuff).  

The genre couples guitars tuned down to Z-flat minor, endless uncoordinated breakdowns and looped samples of hip-hop songs that were bad enough the first time I heard them.  The music operates under the basic assumption that if you gave a billion chimpanzees a billion different typewriters and a billion years to bang away at them, eventually, one of them would write Hamlet. Incredibly enough, Infectious Jelquing’s new EP “Nuclear Slam Division” might be the closest that these primates ever get to Shakespeare.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Blake Harper looked slightly overwhelmed in the first two games. Last year’s MEAC freshman of the year came in as one of the most highly coveted members of Creighton’s impressive transfer portal haul.  Either Harper hit a massive growth spurt in the last week or some sort of optical illusion made it impossible for me to realize he was 6-foot-7 until the Maryland Eastern Shore game.  He played about 6-foot-1 early, but he was most certainly 6-foot-7 in the past two games.  He dropped 14-points in 22 minutes on UMES(S) and followed that up with a stellar 19-point, 12-rebound performance against North Dakota.  If he keeps growing at this rate, by the time they get into conference play, he’ll be 8 feet tall and find it very difficult to find clothes that fit him.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

I don’t really know what inspired me to try to listen to all 23 minutes of  Nuclear Slam Division, but by the fourth track, I found myself almost enjoying it.  There is an ironic magic in being a 50-year-old man driving around Atlanta in your 10-year-old Hyundai with this stuff out the window. But, like salmonella on poorly-stored chicken, it grows on you.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Maryland Eastern Shore is really a hard team to watch.  They play hard and show flashes of talent, but they are overmatched in almost every Division 1 gym in America.  Any sort of offensive rhythm collapsed when Creighton threw a few half-court traps at them. If they had simply played to 11, every hoops fan in Nebraska would have made their 8:30 reservation at Applebee’s, and everyone would have been better off.  

They do have a 6-foot-9, 255-pound Australian leviathan called Joseph Locandro who inexplicably fires three-point shots from everywhere in the arena and looks like he’d be more comfortable with a Lucky Strike hanging out of his mouth out on the floor. First time you see the guy, you think 37-year-old offensive lineman, not Steph Curry.  However, much like this article, the novelty wears off quickly.

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 

Slam metal is similar to the card game Hearts.  You can win in the traditional way, but also, if you manage to get the worst possible hand, which is known as shooting the moon, you can also win that way.  Slam metal tries to do this musically by mashing together 25 years of awful heavy metal, hip-hop, and house music clichés together into one gigantic post-modern, post-literate, post-humanoid hellscape.  Slam bands have been close to shooting the moon musically in the past, but nobody has truly accomplished the feat until this EP. 

They hired some guy named DJ Smokey to work with them on this, and he really manages to add to the experience by introducing breakbeats and Korg M1 organ stabs to what would have already been the sonic equivalent of a garbage truck falling off the Empire State Building.  This is music for people who like listening to the sounds their vacuum cleaner makes.  

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know

North Dakota presented more of a challenge to the Blue Jays.  Disciplined defense, adequate rebounding, and timely three-point shooting kept them within 10 for most of the game, but they had no answer for Owen “The Moline Mauler” Freeman in the paint.  Freeman finished a perfect 6-6 from the field with 8 rebounds and 3 terror-inducing blocks. 13 points is hardly a legendary performance, but what doesn’t show up in the boxscore is the sheer menacing force he exerts every moment he’s in the game.  

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

Nik Graves is starting to present a problem for the Creighton offense.  When he’s on, he is a lethal scorer, but when he isn’t (again…like this article), he tends to force it a little bit.  Coach McDermott’s offense is all about flow and, as was the case in his 2-10 night against North Dakota, he can disrupt the groove and cause the machine to sputter.  

But even if he went 2 for 3,000 from the field, he wouldn’t be nearly as disruptive as the 40-second part of the first track of the album Rate Your Music Disstrack where Infectious Jelquing actually take the metamodern and outrageously unnecessary step of performing a Rate Your Music review of the EP you are listening to at the end of the song. 

(I’ll give Yates the last word here, because I don’t have an ending close to as good…)

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

11/12/2025

In League With Creighton 25-26 Week 2

Back when the schedule came out, I looked at the second game of the season, a trip to Washington state for a tussle with the eternally fantastic, never-rebuilding Gonzaga Bulldogs with dread.  The Zags return some outstanding big men and this year’s Blue Jay roster is not particularly well equipped to defend the likes of 6’9 250 pound behemoths like Graham Ike on the glass.  The Ike kid does a lot of everything, and does it well.  He spent the last few years racking up a double-double almost every night, smashing his way to the basket against any and every defensive scheme. Typically, guys as physical as Ike can be neutralized with the old hack-a-Shaq approach, but he is a regular 80 percent shooter from the line, so that doesn’t work.  Even if you somehow manage to push him off the block, he’s got a wicked midrange game and shot close to 40 percent from 3 last year.  

In order to be competitive in this one, they would need a fantastic performance from Owen Freeman, the obscenely talented 6’10 center transfer from Iowa.  But, Freeman is somewhat limited as he recovers from a major knee surgery that ended his season last year.  While the roster is loaded with transfer talent, things have not congealed yet on either side of the floor.

So, with great trepidation, I poured myself a warm glass of syrup of Ipecac and settled in for what promised to be two hours of unremitting agony.   Creighton was faced with your classic pick your poison situation.  If you focus on taking away the interior with a zone, the Zags can shoot you out of it.  But, if you go man-to-man, they can kill you inside.  The problem with picking your poison is, no matter what you pick, it’s still poison.

In the first half they tried to take away the paint, only to watch Ike knock down three 3-pointers in the first four minutes (he finished 4 for 4 from beyond the arc).  Switching to man didn’t help as they were battered and beaten inside by 6’10 forward Braden Huff.  It was particularly ugly down there when Freeman was off the floor.  They tried valiantly to not allow paint touches, but possessions started to look like selections from Gulliver’s Travels, with a giant doing whatever he pleased as tiny men grabbed at his arms.  Poison, poison everywhere….and lots of drops to drink.

The Jays were able to keep it close in the first half.  The half court sets were executed with some precision and they knocked a few shots down.  But, the ball movement and screens simply weren’t fooling anyone. Possessions became less coherent than the current Supreme Court definition of presidential "official acts” (tip of the cap to Amy Coney Barrett on that one).  Plays regularly devolved into Nik Graves forcing off balance shots from every low percentage spot in the gym.  

The Jays never really found a groove, but they hung around until they ran into what I often call the Watergate Syndrome in the second half.  That’s when it looks like a team is missing for 18 and a half minutes.  From about the fifteen minute mark on they reminded me of  the broken record player I had growing up…stuck on 45 (kids…ask your parents on that one).  A relatively close game turned into a race to the parking lot to beat Spokane traffic as the lead ballooned to 80-45.  After the final five minutes, a furious battle of walkons trying to get into the scorebook, the game mercifully ended with the score 90-63.

Nobody on Creighton had a good night and everyone on Gonzaga was unstoppable.  Listing the Creighton stats here would be like counting the forks in one of the dining rooms of the Titanic.  Hopefully, they burn the tape of the second half, lest their coaching staff and players be blinded by this atrocity exhibition.  If there is a bright side, Greg McDermott is a wizard and he always manages to get the team heading in the right direction by January.   Hopefully, his hat has another rabbit or two in it, because this team doesn’t look anywhere near being ready for the rigors of Big East play this season.  

They look to regroup and find themselves at home on Friday against a Maryland Eastern Shore team that was held to 29 points earlier this year by Georgia.  Hopefully, that one goes down a little more smoothly.

11/7/2025

In League With Creighton (2025-26 season) Week 1

The 2025-26 Creighton Blue Jay season started with a 92 to 76 win against University of South Dakota.  A convincing victory is a great way to start the season, but watching a Creighton game without the ever looming presence of Ryan Kalkbrenner is disconcerting.  Kalk was the greatest defensive player in school history by any possible metric.  He played bruising physical defense and redirected almost every shot for 169 college games and never once fouled out. This would be impressive for anyone regularly sopping up 30 plus minutes a night, but this was a guy who spent the second half of his college career blocking more than 3 shots per game in the post. He was generational and irreplaceable.

It’s almost hard to remember the pre-Kalk days when Creighton was considered a well-oiled scoring machine that was slightly less effective than the 1940s French army on defense.  Can they stop teams this year?  After one game, the jury is still out, but there are some positive signs.

Greg McDermott made the transition process easier by grabbing a slew of talent in the transfer portal.  McDermott and Bruce Springsteen seem to be the only two people on the planet capable of getting people to want to spend meaningful time in Nebraska.  He raided Iowa for two of the best scorers in the country in Josh Dix and center Owen Freeman, robbed Charlotte of scoring machine "Nasty" Nik Graves, and, for good measure, swiped MEAC player of the year Blake Harper from Howard.  Rarely does a team go into a season with four transfers who average nearly twenty points per game.  Add that to a team that returns an elite shooter like Jackson McAndrew and you have the recipe for a team that can light up the scoreboard every night.

On Wednesday, it was apparent early on that they were more talented than South Dakota. The Yotes (not Coyotes…just Yotes…don’t deadname them!) press baseline to baseline and force opponents into playing faster than they ordinarily would.  The result was a game that felt more like a Friday night open gym pick up game where Creighton got to select the first five players than a battle between talented D1 foes.  

Most of the game was spent in transition with the Yotes chasing Creighton around with the tenacity and ineffectiveness of the most famous of all Yotes, Wily E. CoYote.  By playing at a frenetic pace, they did little more than enable Creighton to score baskets more quickly.  Creighton jumped out to a 13 point half time lead, then threw it into cruise control the rest of the way, alternating between three point daggers, layups and uncontested Owen Freeman dunks.

In spite of their offensive dominance, they never really were able to completely pull away because South Dakota got some great looks at the basket. Looks that simply were not there when Kalk was on the floor.  Defensively, they could charitably be called a “work in progress”. 

One bright spot was the newly discovered strength and prowess of McAndrew.  If you had asked most Creighton fans last year what was heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of Jackson McAndrew, a majority would have likely selected the feathers.  The kid looked like a skeleton that had escaped from the biology lab as a freshman, but the training staff put about 15 pounds of muscle on him and he no longer appears to shatter when drawing a charge. Along with holdover Issac Traudt, they have the strength and savvy to force good teams into bad shots.

The newcomers also made some solid stops en route to Coach McDermott’s 500th career victory.  It’s not impossible to imagine this team developing into a squad that can regularly hold opponents under 75 points.  But to make up for what they have lost in interior presence on the defensive end, they are going to need to put up offensive pyrotechnic displays with regularity.  They certainly have the firepower for it.  We will quickly find out if they can do this against top level talent as they next travel to “The Kennel” in Spokane, Washington on November 11th for a matchup with perennial powerhouse Gonzaga.

3/16/2025

In League With Creighton Big East Tournament Edition

Game 1

Fifteen minutes into their Big East opener against DePaul it was looking like this column would be about 2 sentences.  They had scored a whopping 11 points and were down 17.   Little did I know, I was about to get sucked into the game of the year.  After a first half where they looked flatter than a Roy Lichtenstein painting, they turned on the jets and found a way to get back into the game.  But, DePaul wasn’t buying into the whole, “slow first half but the better team comes out in the second and boatraces the 10 seed” narrative.  Layden Blocker was on a mission.  Dude was raining shots like Slayer reigns blood.  Everytime the Jays got close, Blocker would stand on his head, juggle five chainsaws and throw in another completely ridiculous shot.  Jays were down 11 with 1:55 left.  That’s when things got interesting.

Through a series of clever defensive plays, adroit fouling and quick strike offense, the Blue Jays looked more like the Phoenix, rising from the smoldering ashes of a likely first round tournament exit.  When Steven Ashworth buried a cold-blooded three to tie the game at 62 and the Blue Jays got a huge stop to send the game to overtime, I was scraping my jaw off the floor.  Ashworth had been unconscious all night….not in the good way people use it when a guy can’t miss, but literally like a person who had sustained a massive head injury and was seeing squirrels and stars floating around his head.  But when it mattered, he thrust a dagger into the hopes and dreams of the long suffering 25 or so DePaul fans out there.

With a minute and thirty three seconds left in overtime, the Jays were up 8 and my sphincter muscles started to loosen a bit.  Ashworth had fouled out, but there was no way they were coughing up an 8 point lead in 1:33 right?  Wrong!  Without Ashworth on the court, the Jays descended into madness.  Throwing passes to wide open spectators.  Gagging free throws.  Falling apart like the protagonist in a Yates poem.  When, who else, Layden Blocker buried a jumper with one tick left on the clock, we were headed for 5 more minutes of extra basketball.

Down a point guard and flat out exhausted, Creighton needed someone to step up and carry them down the stretch.  Of all the potential heroes I could possibly conjure to mind, the very last on the roster would have been Ty Davis.  Davis is a talented freshman who has logged roughly the length of an Eric Andre episode in minutes over the last two months.  Up until the last 33 seconds of the game, Davis had taken 15 free throws in his entire college career.  He stepped to the line and buried his last four, leading the Jays to an improbable 85-81 double overtime victory.

Game 2

Jamiya Neal had played 50 minutes the previous night.  The kid has pogo sticks for legs, but following a game like that up with a battle against two-time defending National Champion UConn Huskies the next night seemed a bridge too far.  Instead of wilting, Neal came out and played his best game as a Blue Jay.  19 points including 3 baskets from beyond the arc, five boards and three assists.  Unfortunately, his celebratory dunk in the final seconds of the game was what most people were talking about afterwards.  

Throwing down a double pump jam that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an And 1 mixtape with one second left was admittedly not a good decision.  UConn, who seems to relish the opportunity to act as the aggrieved party, was indignant and Hassan Diarra came at Neal looking like he had shown up on the wrong night for the Golden Gloves.  It seemed impossible to imagine that the more unctuous of the Hurley brothers would become Danny. Watching him play at Seton Hall, a viewer might have gotten the idea that the Hurley bloodline was not completely contaminated with arrogance.  His recent heel turn transformation has been unsettling.  Easily one of the most brilliant young minds in the game, a 3-year-long impression of Vic Morrow’s detestable Yankee coach in the Bad News Bears has been the most disappointing part of a great run at UConn.  Of course, he made a point to turn the handshake line into his opportunity to share his own personal Jerry Springer warmup act.  Stay classy, Danny.

McDermott didn’t seem to mind.  His team had made UConn freshman Liam McNeely look more like former Mike Tyson punching bag Peter McNeely for most of the game.  He torched them earlier in the year with 38 points, but at MSG on Friday, Creighton got him to channel his inner-John Starks….13 points on 6 for 20 from the field with no assists. Between that  and Jasen Green throwing down a career high 19 points, the Jays took the Huskies out of the game early and left them there.

Game 3

Creighton has made the most of their short tenure in the Big East.  Since they arrived, they have been outstanding, hovering around the top of the conference standings.  However, they have not yet figured out a way to win the Big East Tournament.  If they were going to do it this year, it would require beating the elite St. John’s defense on their home floor.  The Red Storm have yet to lose a home game this year and as the number 6 team in the country, they are poised to potentially make their first Final Four run since Marlboro Man lookalike Bill Wennington was their center back in the 80s.  

Creighton came out of the gate with their hair on fire in the first half.  Potential Aphex Twin album cover model Jackson McAndrew looked like he was going to give the Jays another improbable hero, racking up 8 quick points in the opening 6 minutes.  Neal was, as the kids say, “in fuego” again.  They opened with a flurry of baskets and took St. John’s completely out of rhythm on offense.  They clung to a 3-point lead at the half and seemed to have a genuine chance to win the game.  

I have no idea what Rick Pitino said or did at halftime, but St. John’s came out in the second half like a team possessed. They amped up the already frenetic pace of the defense, forcing turnovers and even briefly flustering Ashworth and Kalkenbrenner, who are two of the most unflappable players in the country.  They couldn’t miss from the field.  Kadary Richmond and RJ Luis were outrageous in the second half, turning what had been a rather somber MSG crowd into a howling, snapping pack of wild dogs.  They shot 72 percent from the field, 67 percent from three and ran away with the game late.  Pitino, whose coaching resurrection seemed less likely than a 20 leg parlay, proclaimed his official return in the loudest possible way, by delivering the Red Storm their first Big East Tournament Championship since the dot com bubble.

3/7/2025

I’ve always despised Sean Miller, even when he was a kid.  The sausage-fingered wunderkind who used to go on the Johnny Carson Show and do amazing tricks with basketballs.  The human equivalent of a frisbee catching dog.  You could tell that even Carson found the kid’s boundless self-confidence off-putting.  When he was at Pitt playing point guard in the 80s, I used to go down to the Big East Tournament at MSG and yell horrible things about his mother and her relationship with farm animals.  I was thrilled when he became an “accidental” FBI informant and blew his career to smithereens at Arizona.  

I don’t know why I feel this way about him…I just do.  Maybe I’m mean-spirited enough to just want to see a little flash of pain on his round, Jimmy Kimmel looking face.  Maybe it’s professional jealousy.  So when I write something positive about him, please understand that it is the literary equivalent of passing a kidney stone.  I am almost ashamed to admit that the best coached basketball game I’ve seen all year was the game plan Miller threw together and his squad executed against Creighton last week.  He exposed every flaw, took away every possibility and dismantled (or Freemantled) the Jays for forty minutes of shrill, shrieking misery.  

Usually around this point in the season, Creighton has what I call a “roadmap” game.    McDermott has done an exceptional job reviving this team from the brink of implosion, but Xavier illustrated the limitations he’s managed to hide for the last two months.  If you want to beat Creighton, Miller gave the fully articulated version of how.  The key is putting a body on Kalkenbrenner every time he comes within 15 feet of the basket.  Xavier never let him get set up in the post and practically mauled him into catching the ball in places that made it next to impossible for him to score. Meanwhile, they swarmed every possible three point look and sprinted back to take transition baskets away. Possessions regularly degenerated into Jamiya Neal making a wild lunge towards the basket with 3 seconds left on the shot clock and firing up an off-balance prayer to no deity in particular.

For Creighton to make a sustained run in the tournament, they are going to have to figure out a way to beat teams that can physically overwhelm them in the post and on defense. Unfortunately, I can think of at least 8 teams that fit that description, and that’s just in the SEC. Creighton defends well, using spacing and excellent positioning to finesse the opponent into bad shots while rarely picking up fouls.  But, when they face a team who relies on blunt force trauma as an offensive and defensive strategy, there really isn’t much they can do about it.  Tennessee and San Diego State have ended their season in back-to-back years because while Creighton is an outstanding basketball team, they aren’t particularly skilled wrestlers.  

They looked much better late in the week against Seton Hall, scoring at will in the post and from the perimeter. Even Frederick King, the offensively limited back up center who often looks as if he was born with flippers instead of hands, managed to rack up 12 points in nine minutes on the floor. Unfortunately, they aren’t likely to run into many seven win teams in the field of 64. 

3/1/2025

Creighton rolled into last Sunday’s matchup with Georgetown looking to avenge an early season woodshed visit they took at the paws of the Hoyas.  When Jaden Epps knocked down a jump shot 15 minutes into the game giving the Hoyas a 9 point lead, the game seemed to be devolving into something uglier than the Eraserhead baby.  Instead, Creighton rose up, slammed their collective Jordans on the accelerator and went into the half up by 2.  This is a different team than the one Georgetown beat like a rented mule in December.  One key to the change has been the growth and development of McDermott’s most recent Swiss Army Knife, Jasen Green.  Back in December the squad had begun to look like Ashworth, Kalkbrenner, Neal and two very tall cardboard cutouts.  But, Green has a knack of making things happen when they need to.  He provides urgency and toughness on defense and seems to have a preternatural ability to grab offensive rebounds at critical moments.  Creighton cruised in the second half to an 80-69 victory led by Green’s career high 14 points.

The Jays rolled into the Depaul game on Tuesday higher than Bill Walton after a week in a lab at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. If ever a play typified the new direction of the offense, the possession at the 18 minute mark of the first half where Ashworth and Kalk were setting up the standard high pick and roll is a perfect example.  The scouting report on Creighton all year long has been to switch defenders on the play and put a body on Kalk to take away the lob and dunk.  Ashworth, who looks like a perfect rendering of what Brett Easton Ellis envisioned when he created Patrick Bateman, immediately noticed the switch and used that open from the switch to bury a three faster than Bateman could say “co-ed dormitory”.  The Blue Jays spent the duration of the game helping to continue Depaul’s four decade long rebuilding project by taking control and never relinquishing it for a “not as close as it looks in the box score” 75-65 win.

2/21/2025

Dave brought me in to be the beat reporter for Creighton back in October, but due to a disagreement between myself, several law enforcement officials in Box Butte County, Nebraska and a surly, mealy-mouthed local judge who seemed to think that indecent exposure is actually still a crime, I haven’t had access to a computer.  Luckily, my father taught me to make Pruno at a young age, a skill that has made me highly popular with some of the locals.   Thanks to the intervention of my friends Spyder, Despair, and other members in the Cellblock 6 Brotherhood, I have been able to watch every single Creighton game this season.  

Here’s an overview of the season to date…..

November

Things began with such promise.  Ryan Kalkenbrenner helped the Blue Jays to a season opening victory against a spunky UT Rio Grande squad by managing to go 20-22 from the field and finish with a game high 49 points and 11 rebounds.  At that point, I pretty much just assumed Kalk had locked up the Naismith Player of the Year award.  The performance was so spectacular that certain facts that might have been obvious to me were obscured from vision.  For example, why did Creighton just give up 86 points to a team that looked like they were sponsored by Chico’s Bail Bonds?  Or, just who exactly is the point guard?  Or, why are all these tall guys standing around the perimeter chucking threes up when UT Rio Grande seems to be conceding layups?  

But, the Jays were undefeated and everything was lovely.  Game number two solidified my conviction that this Creighton squad was never again going to lose a basketball game by pummeling the college formerly known as Fairly Ridiculous (Fairleigh Dickinson is the name the school has been using since its stunning first round upset over Purdue a few years back).

It wasn't until November 22 that my doubts started to settle in.  In some twisted homage to Lee Harvey Oswald, the Jays celebrated the 61st anniversary of the JFK assassination by being nowhere near the building they were supposed to be in.  In-state basketball powerhouse Nebraska overwhelmed Creighton with a flurry of two handed set shots and variations on the three man weave.  In victory, Nebraska again won the rights using the term “Nebrasketball” for the duration of the season.  Creighton managed to force an endless series of shots from the lowest percentage nooks and crannies of the gym in mustering a meager 63 points.  And, the aforementioned Kalkenbrenner managed a line that even the Warren Commission wouldn’t believe.  38 minutes….0-1 from the field.  Why give the ball to the guy who put up 49 in the opener when the baseline three point shot is so much more efficient? 

It only spiraled from there.  San Diego State avenged their Elite 8 victory over the Jays by holding them to 53 points in route to a 71-53 drubbing.  They followed that with a Heironmous Boschian nightmare of a performance against Texas A&M and a close win against an astonishingly mediocre Notre Dame squad in the 7th place game of the Players Era Classic in Las Vegas.  It was clear that, in the words of former Nobel Prize Winner and Nobel Laureate Michael Ray Richardson, “ship be sinkin’”.

December

The road to hell is often paved with good intentions and December Creighton basketball games.  The month that seems to be the most particularly unkind to the Jays each year.  And, to make matters worse, they started off the month with a matchup against the number one Kansas Jayhawks.  But, just when Creighton’s 2024-25 season seemed to be completing its final revolution around the drain, the Bluejays played inspired basketball and ran Kansas out of the gym with a 76-63 victory.  What followed was a completely confusing series of games in which Creighton caromed from losing a shrieking horror show of a 22-point loss to a Georgetown team that hadn’t won a conference game since the Eisenhower Administration to the loss of star transfer Pop Isaacs for the season due to injury to a remarkable 1 point nailbiter over an extremely talented St. John’s squad.  It was hard to know what to make of any of it.  

By the end December, several things had become apparent about the team.  On the positive side of the ledger, Ryan Kalkenbrenner was every bit as good as we thought he was on both ends of the floor.  Jamiya Neal is the best transition player the Jays have had in a very long time and can be downright explosive in the open court.  Steven Ashworth should be forced to shoot free throws blindfolded to make things fair for the opponent.  The kid is the closest thing to the platonic form of a “pure shooter” that has come down the pike in a long time.

On the negative end, there are an astounding number of gangly limbed forwards on the roster who seem like they could do real damage driving to the basket but feel an almost Manson Family sort of zeal for three point shooting.  To make matters worse, other teams had finally caught on to Coach Greg McDermott’s heavy reliance on the high pick and roll and decided to take that away, making the offense appear more like the scramble to the lifeboats on the Titanic than the fluid, point-accumulating machine it usually is.  The team is filled with several players who seemed to have heard of the concept of a point guard, but think of that as more of a theory rather than a necessary reality. There were moments of promise and moments of terror, but it was starting to feel like one of those NIT kinda years.

January

If there has ever been a stretch of basketball that typified my argument that Greg McDermott is the most innovative offensive coach in all of college basketball, it was this.  McDermott has shown a commitment and level of artistry with the high pick and roll in the last few years that is every bit as breathtaking as Picasso’s Blue Period.  But, what sort of offense would McDermott be left with if defenses genuinely committed to taking it away each game?  Imagine Picasso’s Blue Period without him being able to use the color blue.

McDermott recognized this and went back to the drawing board.  He reimagined the offense into something stunningly beautiful.  Steven Ashworth emerged as the key piece.  Ashworth, who had spent much of his 25 years in college career around the perimeter throwing in three pointers, became the centerpiece of the offense.  Ashworth spent the month morphing into the point guard that Creighton desperately needed.  While still lethal from three point range, Ashworth refined his passing skills and went all-in on making everyone around him more effective going to the basket.  You still see the standard Kalk sets a pick, Ashworth runs his guy off of him and throws up a lob to Kalk for a dunk.  But, these days, Ashworth spends much more time drawing defenders out of position, probing the weaknesses of the defense and exploiting vulnerabilities.  No one is ever going to confuse Creighton with UNLV’s 90’s Runnin’ Rebels teams, but Ashworth seems to regularly fire baseball passes the length of the court to players streaking towards the basket for layups.  As Ashworth has come into focus as the offensive leader, players around him have stepped up and found new ways to score.  The result of this seismic shift that saw the Jays ending the month with six consecutive wins taking them from Bubble Purgatory back into the Top 25.  

Early February 

The Jays started the month white hot, winning a nail biter on the road against Villanova.  Ashworth finished his 13 point, 7 rebound, 7 assist showcase with a remarkable 3-point corner shot to clinch the victory with 8 seconds left.  And the wins kept coming.  The Jays ran their streak to nine in a row before Liam McNeely’s 38 point shooting spree gave them their first loss in over a month to two-time defending champion UConn.  The streak included an impressive win over the number 11 team in the country, Marquette.  In spite of a tough loss on Sunday to Big East leader St. John’s, the Blue Jays have grabbed a firm grip on the number three spot in the conference going into their Sunday rematch with Georgetown.