The Colorado Buffaloes men’s basketball team enters the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada with a first-round bye. The Buffs will play the winner of Oregon and Oregon State Thursday afternoon as they set their sights on a Pac-12 Championship.
The Buffs are playing some of their best basketball of the season of late. The team just went into Utah on their senior night and dismantled the Utes this past Saturday. Not to mention the week prior, the Buffs stunned No. 2 Arizona in Boulder that helped ease the pain of the unacceptable loss to Arizona State two days prior.
That Arizona State loss was a punch to the gut.
In my opinion, if Colorado captures that win and proceeds to take care of business against Arizona, we are looking at a team that is in talks to being on the bubble or in that conversation if you will.
Colorado currently sits at 75 in latest NET rankings — one spot behind their potential opponent Thursday afternoon in the University of Oregon. We’ve just received word that Ducks guard Will Richardson will miss the Pac-12 Tournament due to a non-COVID19 illness and won’t fly out with the team.
That’s potentially good news for Colorado if they do in fact go on to play Oregon. Richardson is the Ducks leading scorer averaging 14.1 points while also leading the team in assists with 3.6.
Back to Colorado’s NET ranking.
Colorado’s low NET ranking is mainly due to the losses to Southern Illinois, Washington State, and Arizona State. The Washington State loss wasn’t even a bad loss in terms of NET ranking, considering the Cougars are ranked at 58.
It’s the way they lost that game.
Colorado ran into a buzzsaw in Arizona State who started to play their best basketball of the season. It seemed as if everything they shot that Thursday night ended up in the hoop.
As for the Southern Illinois game, that was the most disappointing of them all. That’s a 15-15 ball club ranked at 134 in the NET rankings that went a combined 1-10 in Quad 1 & 2 games.
That one win was against Colorado.
I’ve mentioned this already but this is an extremely young team outside of Evan Battey and Eli Parquet. The fact that they even achieved 20-wins this season is an indictment of Tad Boyle and his coaching staff developing these players.
This team could’ve easily rolled over after the Washington State loss and heck, even the Arizona State game. They persevered and continued to fight and were winners of seven of their last eight.
With that being said, Colorado is going to have to make it to the Pac-12 Championship and perhaps win the entire thing in order to get into the NCAA Tournament. Even if they don’t make it and fall short, this team has a really good opportunity to win some games in the NIT and potentially play a few more games at the Coors Event Center.
The road to the championship starts Thursday.
Go Buffs!