BOULDER — Colorado was the first team to play on the second day of the NCAA Tournament. Against Florida State on Monday, though, they’ll have a dinner-time tipoff.
That’s a good thing.
“We’re fortunate enough to not play until tomorrow night, so we’ll get a shootaround again tomorrow to work on some things we didn’t quite get to today,” head coach Tad Boyle told reporters on Sunday.
That shootaround will be crucial for Colorado, as it prepares to play Florida State on a little over 48 hours’ notice.
The Buffs have a little bit of a head start. A few days ago, assistant coaches Mike Rohn and Rick Ray to study CU’s potential opponents. Rohn studied up on UNC-Greensboro, while Ray did some preliminary scouting of Florida State. The plan was similar to how the Buffs handled the Pac-12 Tournament.
Ray handled the FSU assignment because of his history in the South, Boyle said. He was the head coach at Mississippi State from 2012-15 and at Southeast Missouri State from 2015 until he signed on with CU before this season. During this time, he scouted and recruited some of FSU’s current roster.
“You have to stay a step ahead because, again, one-day preparation is not much,” Boyle said. “If we would have asked Coach Ray to start last night to prepare for Florida State, he wouldn’t have got any sleep and he probably wouldn’t have been too functional today when he was presenting to the team.”
Now it’s up to Rohn and assistant coach Bill Grier to study up on Colorado’s potential Sweet 16 opponents, Michigan and LSU. (Boyle didn’t know who Colorado could be due to play in the Sweet 16, since he hadn’t had a chance to look that far ahead in the bracket.)
“I say all the time you know these guys are very very fortunate to have the coaching staff that they do and I’m not talking about their head coach I’m talking about their assistant coaches, who have all been head coaches,” Boyle said.
And there are more benefits to Monday’s shootaround than just implementing additional pieces of the gameplan, too.
“I think it’s always good to get off your feet before playing a late game like that. Keep us sharp, keep our mind sharp, kind of go over some of their actions that we’re going to see,” senior D’Shawn Schwartz said. “But I think the biggest thing is just getting off our feet getting out of bed, staying out of the hotel for a little bit.”
With 68 teams in Indiana last week, the odds of keeping the tournament completely Covid-free were slim. One team, VCU, already had to forfeit a game because of the virus. That’s why so many precautions are in place, and why players have to spend so much of their day cooped up in their hotel rooms.
