PITTSBURGH — The only team to beat UConn in the last three months was back in the NCAA Tournament Thursday. When last seen on this stage, the Creighton Bluejays were trying to extract the stake that had been struck through their hearts. San Diego State, remember?
The coach does. “When you’re a possession from the Final Four and you don’t get there,” Greg McDermott said the other day, “I think it really hits you square in the face.”
Anyway they’re back, and the first round went fine here Thursday, 77-60 over Akron as Creighton shot 56.5 percent and put all five starters in double figures. It looked like the Bluejays know where they’re going, and maybe recollections of the sick feeling a year ago has something to do with that.
A recap of that day in Louisville: The score was tied late in the regional championship game and San Diego State’s Darrion Trammell drove the lane. There was some contact. Not a lot, but some. Foul. Two free throws. Trammell made only one but that was deadly enough for the 57-56 win. That’s how close Creighton came to its first Final Four in history. McDermott took the high road afterward and refused to be drawn into berating the call, but the message he wanted his players to take away was not to let themselves be put in that situation in the first place. He figured that lesson might be useful one day.
Like now.
We can go around the Creighton locker room Thursday after the Akron win.
Here’s guard Trey Alexander, who had 19 points against Akron, on the memory of those 1.2 seconds: “That’s made us more hungry. In preparation we’ve been more locked in than we’ve ever been. I think this group knows what’s at stake here. And I think we know we can back to that same position.
“You know how beautiful the ride is when you get down to the nitty gritty and the Elite Eight.”
Alexander has never watched the final seconds of the San Diego State game, and doesn’t plan to anytime soon. “I just don’t think it’s a good juju. But we’ve always talked about not putting ourselves in that position again. Not putting anything the refs, putting it on ourselves.”
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Here’s Steven Ashworth, a senior guard who played in the NCAA Tournament last year, but not for Creighton. He was at Utah State, But from his first summer workouts with the Bluejays he heard the conversation about not letting anything like those 1.2 seconds happen again. Not in March, anyway.
“There’s definitely a sense that there’s a game out that we want to win,” he said. “At the same time this is a completely new team in some ways. We’ve let it fuel us but at the same time we don’t let it be a distraction from what we’re trying to do in the moment.”
Here’s Baylor Scheierman, whose layup in the final minute tied San Diego State. “We’ve kind of turned the page forward, but I think getting to that point, we know what we need to do to get there.”
As for this team’s potential to do that, one score must be mentioned, from Feb. 20.
Creighton 85, UConn 66.
The Huskies play lots of games like that, but they’re invariably on the left side of the score, not the right. “It kind of felt like we ran into a buzz saw,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said that night. Take away that unexpected bushwhacking, and the No. 1 Huskies are 21-0 since late December.
“They’re playing as good a basketball as anybody in the country in a long, long time,” Ashworth said. “The fact that we were able to beat them was awesome, but at the same time we have to remember it was our home court. But the team that’s the No. 1 team in the country had a hard time guarding us and scoring on us so we can use that as fuel.”
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Said Alexander, “Obviously, it shows we can beat anybody in the country.”
Creighton’s journey this season and this month comes with several unusual quirks.
Did you know, for instance, that six weeks before Creighton took down UConn, Nebraska rolled over then-top-ranked Purdue by 16 in Lincoln? The Cornhusker State was no place for a No. 1 visitor to be this season.
Did you know that while Creighton was winning here Thursday afternoon at a first round site hosted by Duquesne, Duquesne was upsetting BYU in Omaha at a first round site hosted by Creighton?
Did you know the Bluejays have made 158 more three-pointers this season than its opponents, meaning they’ve outscored the other teams by 474 points from beyond the arc?
Did you know that Ryan Kalkbrenner was just named Big East Defensive Player of the Year for the third time? That McDermott won his 10th NCAA Tournament game, which is one more than every other Creighton coach combined? That the Bluejays led the nation going into Thursday by committing only 11.3 fouls a game? Alabama and Nebraska are the only two opponents all season who reached the bonus in the first half. Creighton has made 34 more free throws than its opponents have taken. Akron had six attempts Thursday. Creighton had 20.
Did you know that since 2002, every single national champion finished the regular season in the top-40 in the KenPom metric ratings in adjusted offense and the top-20 in adjusted defense? Only nine teams meet that criteria this season and the names carry a lot of tonnage: UConn, Houston, Purdue, North Carolina, Marquette, Arizona, Tennessee, Auburn... and Creighton.
Did you know Creighton's 22-point win at Butler was the 14th-largest defeat for the Bulldogs ever at Hinkle Fieldhouse, which opened in 1928? The Creighton sports information folks have dug up a hopeful tidbit about that. In the past 32 years, the only other two teams to win by at least 22 at Butler were North Carolina in 1992-93 and UConn last season. Both ended up winning the national championship.
Omens help. But not as much as the experience of a starting lineup with five guys who have played in nearly 600 college basketball games, many of them in this tournament. “You know what to expect,” McDermott said. “Teams that are here the first time are taking pictures and doing all that when they go on the court. Our guys today were like, all right, this is where we expected to be. What are we going to do, and let's do it and get out of here.”
They have been around the block, these Bluejays. They understand how good March can feel, and how bad.
