Colorado couldn’t generate good looks late against UCLA’s defense Saturday night.
At one point in the game, Colorado went nearly 10 minutes without making a shot from the field. UCLA made a 16-point run. The stretch doomed the Buffs in the game.
Once again, the Colorado Buffaloes have given themselves no room for error.
“We’ve got five losses now,” head coach Tad Boyle said. “Sellout crowd. Our fans deserve better than they got tonight. I’m sick to my stomach for a lot of reasons but mostly for the two seniors and mostly for our fans because our fans were terrific this last homestand and we didn’t play well enough. That stings because when they show up, you want to give them a reason to show up and we didn’t do a good job tonight.”
With three games to play, the Buffs are 10-5. They’re tied with Oregon, and the teams split the season series. They’re tied with UCLA, but UCLA won both matchups this season and therefore holds the tiebreaker. They’re a half-game up on 9-5 Arizona. They’re a half-game behind 10-4 Arizona State, who the Buffs beat in the teams’ lone conference game this season. (The game in China to open the season doesn’t count as a part of conference play.)
One of these five teams will win the regular-season Pac-12 title and one won’t even earn a bye through the first round of the conference tournament.
Essentially, Colorado can’t afford to lose again, despite playing all three of their final games on the road. Plus, they need one loss each from Arizona, Arizona State and UCLA. If that happens, the Buffs will be the champions.
“You’ve got to be able to win on the road to compete for league championships,” head coach Tad Boyle said. “This one stings because you’re supposed to hold serve at home. This is our third home loss.”
There are 10 weekends in the Pac-12 conference season. Five weekends at home and five on the road. The easiest path to a league title is to win the home games and split the road games. That’s good for a 14-4 record, and often the Pac-12 crown.
But for every home loss, a team needs to compensate with a road weekend sweep.
Arizona made up for a rough start with a road sweep. Arizona State did the same thing. With UCLA’s win over Colorado on Saturday, the Bruins have completed their road sweep.
“UCLA came in and swept the mountain schools and that’s a testament to them,” Boyle said.
If Colorado is going to compete for the title they’ll need a road sweep of their own and they only have one more opportunity, next weekend against the Northern California schools. Then, they’ll head to Utah for their lone game in the season’s final weekend. That has to be a win too.
“We’ve got to figure out a way to beat Cal next Thursday,” Boyle said. “That’s what we have to do. Cal is playing really good. They’re very good at home. Stanford’s got all their guys back; they got all hands-on deck. Utah, we know how good they are at home.”
Colorado has consistently put itself in a bad position this season. An early loss to Oregon State put the Buffs behind the eight ball just two games int0 the Pac-12 season. Then the Buffs rattled off a pair of wins to climb back to the top of the standings.
A loss to Arizona, a good basketball team, knocked Colorado back down again. The Buffs won two more games to get back on track. This happened over and over, not just during conference play, but also in a loss to Northern Iowa and a subsequent bounce-back.
Colorado has proven it can win when it needs to, but now the margin for error has decreased to zero for the final three games.
The difference this time is that just taking care of business the rest of the way may not be enough.
And they have to do it on the road.
