INDIANAPOLIS — The Big Dance is over for the Colorado men’s basketball team.
Despite a valiant second-half comeback by the Buffaloes, CU’s Sweet 16 dreams fell short of the elusive Sweet 16 berth, as second-seeded Marquette held off the Buffs for an 81-77 victory in an NCAA Tournament second-round battle at Gainbridge Fieldhouse.
CU rallied from an 11-point halftime deficit to set up a third thrilling tournament-game finish in the past five days, but this time the Buffs fell short.
Colorado opened the second half with a 10-2 run to get back in the game, and took a brief lead at 55-54 on a KJ Simpson 3-pointer midway through the second half. The Golden Eagles answered with an 8-2 run but CU tied it again at 74-74 on a Tristan da Silva 3-pointer with about 3 minutes left.
Marquette outscored the Buffs 7-3 the rest of the way to end CU’s season.
Simpson finished with 20 points and seven assists, while da Silva scored 17.
BOULDER — The NCAA still can’t read a room. But man, can they ever kill one.
Kindyll Wetta and her teammates on the CU women’s basketball team were belles of the ball inside the Dal Ward Center. You shoulda seen it. Balloons. Cheerleaders. Catering. One of the sweetest pep rallies to grace the Touchdown Club since Coach Prime got injected into the Buffs’ bloodstream here some 16 months ago.
As the NCAA Tournament brackets came on the screen, the party hushed. Then when Kansas State came up as a 4 seed and as a host for the first weekend of the women’s Big Dance, it sank.
“It’s definitely a bummer for me because I wanted to play at home and I wanted to be in front of my family,” Wetta, the firebrand of a Buffs guard and former Valor Christian star, told me after CU found out its first stop in Bracketville would be as a 5 seed opposite K-State in the Little Apple of Manhattan, Kan. “I thought this year we really had a great shot of doing that. It’s disappointing in that sense.”
There was a lot of that going around here Sunday night. The mood was even less jovial a few hours earlier up in Fort Collins, where the men’s selection committee decided to take its annual dose of stupid out on the Mountain West as a whole — and on the Rams in particular.
Want a laugh? Committee member Bubba Cunningham contended on CBS that teams selected from the Mountain West, save for San Diego State, got strapped to double-digit seedings because their best wins were over one another.
“(That) made it more challenging for us,” Cunningham explained.
Not half as challenging, apparently, as trying to stay up past 10 p.m. Eastern to do homework on teams west of Lincoln. Poor guy.
At least five teams — lookin’ at you, Oregon, NC State and New Mexico — “stole” bids from more worthy at-larges by winning their respective conference tourneys. But any ‘S’ curve that’s got CSU as the “last team in” gets an automatic F.
Do you watch the games, Bubba? Or do you watch “X” and Instagram and hope for the best? CSU beat Creighton by 21 on a neutral court. The Jays were slotted as a No. 3 seed Sunday. The Rammies (24-10) were unveiled as a 10.
Boise State, who’ll take on Tad Boyle’s CU men on Wednesday night, beat Saint Mary’s on a semi-neutral floor by three. The Gaels are dancing as a 5 seed. The Broncos, like CSUand CU, are a 10 seed having to scrap their way over to the Big Kids’ Bracket by winning in Dayton first.
“To be honest, I was really surprised how most of the Mountain West was seeded,” stunned CSU coach Niko Medved, who’ll face Virginia on Tuesday in Ohio, told reporters.
“But you know what? That’s fine. They always disrespect our league. And now it’s time to go out and do something about it.”
Amen. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the Cavaliers (23-10), on paper, are certainly in the Rammies’ weight class. For one thing, unlike Michigan in 2022, UVa doesn’t have a Hunter Dickinson down low, taking up a duplex’s worth of space in the paint. On the surface, it’s the irresistible force (CSU’s shooters) against the immovable object (Tony Bennett’s trademark tire-iron defense), a classic Clark Kellogg “contrast-in-styles” scrum between a Rams offense ranked 42nd nationally by KenPom.com in adjusted offensive efficiency and a Cavs D that’s seventh in adjusted defense. If you’re hopping over to Dayton, take the under and take your pizza square-cut.
If the Oppenheimers on the men’s committee dinged CSU for its 4-7 mark away from Moby Madness, their counterparts on the women’s side docked the Buffs (22-9) for losing six of their last eight, including a maddening, come-from-ahead loss to Oregon State in the Pac-12 tourney.
In March, you make your own luck. The Buffs women — despite being one of the best draws in all of college basketball, male or female — didn’t.
“I mean, (it’s) definitely frustrating,” Wetta said. “But like (Coach JR Payne) said, you can’t dwell on that, because (now) it’s completely different conferences, completely different teams, styles of play.”
CU women’s basketball players react to being selected as the fifth seed for the NCAA tournament during a watch party in the Touchdown Club at Dal Ward at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado on March 17, 2024. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)
At least Wetta and her teammates know the drill. Payne’s Buffs got shipped to third seed and host Duke at this time last year and earned their Sweet 16 berth the hard way, stomping 11th-seeded Middle Tennessee and then shocking the Blue Devils in overtime to advance out of Durham.
“I feel like the same situation’s happened to us the past two years, where we thought we should’ve been a higher seed and we weren’t,” Wetta reflected. “So, again, it’s nothing new. Disappointing, but we’re used to it.
“I think we definitely do better with underdog mentality. So I think that’s a good thing going into the NCAA Tournament. It just adds a little bit of fuel to the fire.”
Why bust brackets when you can burn ’em? Pack your bags, kids. And your grudges. This dance just got personal.
Why the Buffs won: They kept their composure late, played solid defense throughout the night and hit some big shots when needed.
Three stars:
1. CU’s Maddie Nolan: Had a season-high 20 points, including six 3-pointers.
2. CU’s Aaronette Vonleh: Finished with only 10 points offensively, but had seven rebounds and a steal.
3. Washington’s Lauren Schwartz: Scored 18 points and hit all four 3-point attempts.
Up next: CU will host Washington State on Saturday at 1 p.m. (Pac-12 Network).
Colorado didn’t dominate in its return home, but the No. 13 Buffaloes found something it had been sorely missing: a victory.
Maddie Nolan got hot from 3-point range early and the Buffs had just enough in the tank late to hold off Washington 68-62 on Thursday night at the CU Events Center.
CU (21-7, 11-6 Pac-12) snapped a four-game losing streak and kept slim hopes alive for a top-four seed – and first-round bye – for next week’s Pac-12 Tournament.
“I was just really excited to win again,” said Nolan, who went 6-of-7 from beyond the arc and had a season-high 20 points. “After the game, I was jumping around and I was like, ‘Guys, we won!’ The season is so long and you get so caught up in different things and then the losses, it can be hard, but just remembering to celebrate every win, whether it’s against a top-five team or whoever. So just excited to be back in the win column, for sure.”
CU head coach JR Payne often expresses the idea that being great on a given day is the main goal more so than getting a win. The Buffs weren’t great against the Huskies (15-13, 5-12), but she was more than happy to celebrate the much-needed win.
“Absolutely,” she said. “We definitely needed to be in the win column again, because even though we played really well at times – we played really well offensively at USC and really, really well defensively at UCLA – it still didn’t translate into a win. Certainly we are all going to feel better with getting that sort of out of the way and now we just want to really dial in and continue to get better.”
In addition to Nolan’s big game, Frida Formann had 12 points and Aaronette Vonleh finished with 10 points and seven rebounds.
The Buffs, however, had to thwart a late Washington rally.
CU never trailed in the final 36 minutes and led by as many as 15 in the third quarter. The lead was still 12 midway through the fourth when the Buffs went cold, failing to score a single point for 5 minutes, 23 seconds while Washington pulled within five, at 64-59.
Buffs point guard Jaylyn Sherrod, who went down with a face injury early in the third, then returned to the game with 36.1 seconds left to boost the Buffs. She was able to hit 2-of-4 free throws and help with CU’s ball control down the stretch to hold off the Huskies.
Colorado guard Frida Bormann drives against Washington guard Hannah Stines in Pac-12 basketball on Feb. 29, 2024 in Boulder.(Cliff Grassmick/Staff Photographer)
The close-game experience of Sherrod and other veterans played a role in holding off the Huskies.
“I don’t know how well we executed down the stretch but I mean, yeah, just trying to get the ball in out of bounds, know who to get it to, stuff like that, you kind of learn along the way and knowing how many timeouts you have,” Formann said. “We’ve been practicing some late game situations. So just being aware of clock and score and all that is super important. So it’s always good to get practice with that in a live game.”
Ultimately, it wasn’t the prettiest of games for the Buffs, who had just two days of rest before this one (Washington had three), but they got the job done after a three-game road trip.
“Just really happy to be back at home,” Payne said, “and I’m really happy with how we played in spurts; certainly not 40 minutes but we played really, really well in some spurts on both sides of the floor. Just pushing through fatigue and some injury and things like that. I knew we’d be tired. We had the longest trip, we played a day later than they did and all of that, so I was really happy with how we responded.
“A lot of people came in and really contributed at different times. Even played through frustration, maybe missing some shots we normally make, but kept their head in the game so that when the game was on the line, we were able to execute and do some good things.”
Notable
In the NCAA committee’s second Top 16 reveal on Thursday evening, the Buffs were tabbed as a No. 4 seed, and No. 13 overall. In the previous reveal, on Feb. 15, the Buffs were a No. 1 seed, and No. 4 overall. The nine-spot drop matches the largest in the eight-year history of the Top 16 reveals. In 2022, Tennessee went from No. 4 to No. 13. However, it keeps CU in line to host during the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
