Woelk: Boyle's Buffs Will Bounce Back
January 06, 2020 | Men's Basketball, Neill Woelk
BOULDER — Deep breath, Buffaloes fans. Take your hands off the panic button.
One Pac-12 loss — no matter how painful — is still just one loss.
No doubt, Sunday's stunning Colorado loss to Oregon State is going to sting for a while. The circumstances — at home, on the heels of a win over the No. 4 team in the country and with an 11-point lead with under eight minutes to play — make it a particularly bitter defeat. Tad Boyle's Buffs will no doubt spend plenty of time this week dissecting their late implosion and working on ways to make sure it doesn't happen again.
But with 16 conference games remaining, the key for the Buffs will be whether they learn from the loss — and if history is any guide, Boyle's team will do just that.
No doubt, Sunday's loss was perplexing in a variety of ways. After controlling the game and tempo for more than 30 minutes, the Buffs collapsed against a press trap and 1-3-1 zone. OSU forced six turnovers in the final eight minutes and outscored the Buffs 24-5 in that stretch.
Particularly befuddling was the fact that Boyle had prepared his team for exactly such an OSU strategy in practice the day before. They knew it was coming. Equally mystifying was the fact that Colorado had seen similar pressure from Oregon just three nights prior, and had handled that pressure from the nation's No. 4 team with ease.
After the game, Boyle — never a coach to point the finger of blame at his players — assumed responsibility for the meltdown.
"That's on me as a coach," he said. "We did not handle that well and that is my fault."
But truth is, it was a team effort. Every player on the floor had a role in the eight-minute collapse. The Buffs didn't handle the ball well, they didn't shoot well, they didn't play defense well and they didn't rebound well in the last eight minutes. While the coach certainly is responsible for his team's performance, the players on the floor also shoulder a measure of accountability as well.
Guaranteed, they will accept that burden and work to correct it.
Thanks to a quirk in the schedule, Colorado has an entire week to get ready for its next game. The Buffs need to ensure they are at their best Sunday when they play host to Utah in a 4 p.m. matchup at the CU Events Center.
They'll spend the week getting themselves "right."
"The challenge is to get the guys to understand that nothing is going to be given to you," Boyle said after Sunday's game. "I talked to them a lot about earning respect and what we've done over the last two or three four games. We've played to earn some respect, and how quickly that can go away. We earned some beating Dayton, and playing the way that we did against Iona, and then beating Oregon. We just stubbed our toes again, just like we did against Northern Iowa. You eat what you kill. That's the challenge is to get them to understand that."
The guess here is the Buffs will understand. This is a veteran team with seasoned leaders, beginning with junior point guard McKinley Wright IV. Wright is a tough-minded floor general who has led the Buffs through rough patches in the past, and he has plenty of help in that regard on this year's team.
It's logical to believe the Buffs will respond once again in solid fashion. It is a long Pac-12 season.
Some other quick observations after the first week of conference play:
— This is a balanced, deep league. Unlike a year ago, the Pac-12 had a solid non-conference season, collecting some quality wins along the way.
But here's all you need to know about how balanced this conference might be as league play unfolds: after the first weekend of play, nobody went 2-0. The only unbeaten teams remaining in league play are Stanford and Arizona, who played only once in their "rivalry" weeks.
Meanwhile, the eight teams that played twice all went 1-1. It means there are going to be ups and downs for just about everyone, and the battle for a conference crown and the top-four conference tournament seeds is going to be one of attrition.
— National polls are difficult to understand. How damaging was the loss to Oregon State in the eyes of the national pollsters?
Evidently not much, at least not when taking into consideration the Buffaloes' win over Oregon. CU actually moved up in the national polls on Monday, taking over the No. 25 spot in the Associated Press poll and receiving the 26th most votes in the coaches' poll.
— But the NET hit hurts. After moving up to No. 18 over the weekend in the NET rankings (a key tool for the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee), the Buffs dropped all the way to No. 32 in Monday's rankings.
The 14-spot drop was by far the largest for any team in the top 50.
The Pac-12 now has six teams in the top 50, led by Arizona at No. 13 and followed by Oregon (15), Stanford (16), Colorado (32), Washington (44) and Utah (47).
Washington jumped up 27 spots after a 72-40 thumping of USC (and despite an overtime loss to UCLA) and Utah moved up seven spots after beating Oregon State and losing to Oregon. USC, meanwhile, dropped 21 spots to No. 71 while OSU reaped the benefit of its win in Boulder by moving up 22 spots to No. 56.
The Buffs, by the way, still have two wins over top 30 teams in the NET, Oregon (15) and Dayton (8).
Contact: Neill.Woelk@Colorado.edu
