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Tag: niko medved

  • Keeler: Ali Farokhmanesh is losing his voice, but not his love for CSU Rams

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    FORT COLLINS — The voice bobbed and weaved like a cornered boxer. Sentences that started as butter finished with the scrape of burnt toast.

    Ali Farokhmanesh looked great Saturday at Moby Arena, wearing a calm smile and a white CSU polo. Dude sounded like holy heck.

    “I mean, (I’m) yelling more than I was, talking more, just constantly talking,” the new Rams men’s basketball coach told me after his squad scrimmaged for the public Saturday, the warm-up act for a Homecoming football tussle against Hawaii.

    “So I think that’s the biggest adjustment. That’s the biggest thing I had to figure out is how to get my voice to stay. Because the first event we did in downtown (Fort Collins), it was gone. I started like shaking up and down. I sounded like I was going through puberty again, like …”

    “That Brady Bunch song?”

    “Pretty much,” he laughed. “If you can find something for my throat to fix that, let me know.

    “I always joke with our guys, though, I’m saying our body language matters and how you respond to refs, how you talk to them. Well, then, I shouldn’t lose my voice because I shouldn’t be (yelling). We’ll see how it goes on November 3.”

    As Peter Brady once sang, when it’s time to change, then it’s time to change. Farokhmanesh, 37, is re-arranging who he is and what he’s gonna be.

    No Nique Clifford? No Niko Medved? No problemo. For now, anyway.

    If CSU football feels a bit like a marriage that has lost its spark, Rams hoops is still ensconced in nuptial bliss. You’d be hard-pressed to find a heart in Fort Fun that doesn’t love Farokhmanesh. And Ali’s family.

    Although a first-time head coach, Farokhmanesh is working overtime these days to stay out of his wife Mallory’s doghouse. The other night, she caught him falling asleep while watching practice film. All parties agreed he could pick it back up at 5:30 in the morning.

    “I feel like I try to have a balance, right?” Farokhmanesh said. “Which you never really do, but you’re always fighting for. So, she does a good job of managing that with me, too. I think she helps me a lot with that.”

    Colorado State’s Jevin Muniz drives to the basket during an intrasquad scrimmage Saturday at Moby Arena. (Nathan Wright/Loveland Reporter-Herald)

    On the court, with a half-dozen new faces, the Rams’ lineup is a work in progress. Rotations are in flux. Medved’s fingerprints are still there, but with tweaks and tucks — some spread, some motion, constant movement.

    Farokhmanesh was the boy genius with the whiteboard on the sidelines, feeding the Niko machine. On Saturday, that board was in the hands of assistant coach Cole Gentry. Besides work-life balance and trying to do too much all at once, the next biggest challenge for first-time coaches is delegating authority. Giving up the stuff they used to obsess over.

    “I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job (with that),” Farokhmanesh said. “I’m not doing the subs right now. I’m not doing the baseline out of bounds (plays) now. Those are all things I did before. I’ve given up the board. But I’m still going to have a say in all of it. So, it’s giving it up, but it’s also like, you’re still involved. I don’t know. It’s just different.”

    The Ali Era’s “soft” opening is a tricky one: The Rams play an exhibition at Creighton on Oct. 25 in advance of the Nov. 3 home lid-lifter against Incarnate Word.

    Farokhmanesh and Jays coach Greg McDermott are both Northern Iowa Panthers, which is fun. Creighton just beat Iowa State in an exhibition by 13 this past Friday, which is … yeah, not so fun.

    “And after what they did in Iowa State, I’m a little more nervous,” the Rams coach said. “If we want to be an NCAA Tournament team, you’ve got to play teams like that. Does that help us to just go scrimmage a D2 (school)? Does it? We’ll get something out of it. But I want to challenge our (guys), and I want to put them on a stage. Because if we want to play at the highest levels, we’re going to have to beat people on those stages and compete with them.”

    Farokhmanesh, long one of Medved’s best teachers and recruiters, is already taking names on the recruiting trail. Reported 2026 commit Pops Dunson, a 6-foot point guard out of Douglasville, Ga., is the highest-ranked prep signee for the Rams this century, according to the 247Sports.com database.

    “If you’ve got time, he’s in here working with you,” said CSU forward Rashaan Mbemba, who leads the Rams roster in returning minutes with 615 (19.2 per game) and returning points (7.0 per game). “And I think that’s something you’ve got to really appreciate. I mean, he has four kids, he has a wife. Being a head coach, a husband, a dad. Now he’s also like, kind of, for a lot of guys, he’s the first person to talk to. As a team and as a community, we really appreciate that.”

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    Sean Keeler

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  • Keeler: CSU Rams coach Jay Norvell is becoming his own worst enemy in FoCo

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    FORT COLLINS — CSU ranks 99th nationally in passing (197.3 yards per game) and No. 1 in throwing stuff against the wall.

    Are the Rams a power run team? An Air Raid team? Pro style? Spread? Multiple? All of the above? None of the above?

    Jay Norvell, the head coach, needs to re-assign Jay Norvell, the offensive coordinator, before it’s too late. Close games are turning chaotic at Canvas Stadium — only not in a good way. The Rams are tied for 127th out of 136 FBS programs in penalties per game (8.7) and 121st in penalty yards (76.3).

    You wait too long to yank a cold hand (Brayden Fowler-Nicolosi) at quarterback against UTSA. You put in a hot hand (Jackson Brousseau), who slings you back into a tie game, 17-17, with 29 seconds left … only to take that tying point off the board and take said “hot hand” out of the contest.

    Then you ask your third-string QB, a runner by trade (Tahj Bullock) who hasn’t completed a throw all year, to come off the bench cold, sprint right and pass you to a victory?

    “That was one where I felt like that was our best chance to win, right there and right now,” Norvell explained Monday after watching film of CSU’s 17-16 home loss to the Roadrunners. “And so, I don’t regret it. I don’t. We needed to execute it better.”

    I don’t know, man.

    To be clear: CSU football is in a far, far better place than at this time four years ago. Daz Ball was a disaster from the jump.

    It was also, in hindsight, a hysterically low bar to clear. And instead of consolidating the fan base in Year 4, Norvell has become Fort Fun’s Rorschach test.

    True, his Rams are a two-point conversion away from being 2-1. A Bullock completion from rolling into a winnable home matchup against Washington State (2-2), coming off two Houdini escapes.

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    Sean Keeler

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  • Keeler: NCAA Tournament selection committees did CU Buffs, CSU Rams dirty

    Keeler: NCAA Tournament selection committees did CU Buffs, CSU Rams dirty

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    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 CSU and 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)

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    Sean Keeler

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  • CSU Rams lose to Nevada on buzzer-beater

    CSU Rams lose to Nevada on buzzer-beater

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    FORT COLLINS — Just when it looked like Colorado State had completed a second-half comeback to send its game against Nevada to overtime, the Wolf Pack made sure extra time would not be needed.

    Isaiah Stevens drained a jumper to tie the game at 74 with 2.8 seconds remaining, but the Wolf Pack banked in a half-court 3-pointer at the buzzer to claim a 77-74 victory Tuesday night at Moby Arena.

    It was CSU’s first Mountain West conference loss at home and just its second loss at home this season. It was also CSU’s third straight loss overall on the heels of an 0-2 road trip last week at New Mexico and UNLV.

    The Rams dropped to 20-9 overall and 8-8 in the Mountain West with two games remaining in the regular season.

    “Basketball can be unforgiving sometimes,” CSU head coach Niko Medved said. “Tonight was a gut-punch. There’s no other way around it.”

    Trailing 39-28 at halftime, the Rams scored the first four points to cut the Wolf Pack lead to 39-32 and then cut it to five at 42-37 on a layup by Patrick Cartier with 14:21 remaining in the game.

    But a 3-pointer followed by three free throws from a foul on a 3-point attempt pushed the Wolf Pack’s lead back to double digits at 48-37 with 13:20 left.

    CSU got back within five after a three-point play by Patrick Cartier made it 53-48 with 10:15 remaining. The Rams got that close a few more times, the last coming on a free-throw by Jalen Lake with 4:19 remaining that made it 63-58.

    With 3:23 remaining, the Rams got within two at 63-61 on a three-point play by Stevens, but the Wolf Pack answered, as they did all game, with four straight points to extend their lead to multiple possessions again.

    Finally, the Rams got within striking distance, pulling within three on a 3-pointer by Nique Clifford with 22 seconds left and then two on a jumper by Stevens with 11 seconds remaining and then tied it on another jumper by Stevens with just under three seconds left.

    Colorado State’s Nique Clifford puts up a shot against Nevada on Tuesday at Moby Arena in Fort Collins. (Nathan Wright/Loveland Reporter-Herald)

    Then Nevad’s Jarod Lucas, who missed a pair of free throws between Stevens’ two jumpers, raced down the sideline, heaved the ball from halfcourt and banked it in.

    “It was a heck of a game,” Stevens said. “We kept fighting. I give our team a lot of credit, but we just didn’t make that last play.”

    Stevens led the Rams with 23 points. Joel Scott added 15 and Clifford 10.

    CSU led for the first 1:51, but after Nevada took a 5-3 lead on a 3-pointer, the Rams never led again in the opening 20 minutes.

    The Wolf Pack extended its lead to five before the Rams were able to whittle it back down to one at 10-9 after a 3-pointer by Clifford with 13:40 left in the first half.

    Nevada took a seven-point lead at 29-16, but the Rams cut their deficit to four at 30-26 on a jumper by Lake, but CSU would get no close than that before halftime as the Wolf Pack closed the period on a 9-2 run to take an 11-point lead into halftime.

    Five first-half turnovers and a 39.3 shooting percentage from the field hurt the Rams in the first half. They were also only 5-for-12 (41.7%) from behind the 3-point line and got to the free-throw line once. Joe Palmer made one of two on that lone trip to the stripe.

    Stevens had 10 points to lead the Rams in the first half.

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    Nathan Wright

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