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Colorado Buffaloes hope being themselves will get them back to winning ways in NCAA Tournament

March 16, 2021

BOULDER — After Colorado lost to Oregon State in the Pac-12 Championship on Saturday, head coach Tad Boyle said that he thought his team was too tight.

“We’ve got to get over the disappointment, and it’s real in that locker room,” Boyle said Saturday night. “These guys really wanted this and I thought sometimes we played tonight like we wanted it too much, rather than just playing our game. I know how much our players wanted this win, McKinley (Wright IV) and Evan (Battey) and Jeriah (Horne) and Dallas (Walton), all the seniors, D’Shawn (Schwarz), but we just didn’t play well enough when the lights came on and that’s disappointing because I know we’re better than what we played tonight.”

By Sunday, he’d changed his mind. Well, sort of.

“I thought about that I probably used a bad choice of words,” Boyle said. “When I said tight, I just felt I felt like we were almost too excited, too amped up and wanted it too much if that makes sense and it’s hard to explain in words I guess, but I don’t think it was necessary tightness in terms of nervousness, it was just, we mentally didn’t do some of the things we needed to do in terms of the defensive gameplan.”

Boyle had talked about the defensive gameplan Saturday night, as well. He said that the goal was to guard the 3-point line, since Oregon State had already made 20 threes in the tournament, but that didn’t happen.

“When (Maurice) Calloo gets the looks he had and Jarod Lucas gets the looks he had, it means we’re not paying attention to the game plan and we’re not executing the game plan,” Boyle said. “And that was disappointing.”

Boyle mentioned that the team had done a great job following the gameplan plenty of times this season, but attention to detail was a problem on Saturday.

The mental mistakes weren’t the only problem, though.

“And then physically, we just got beat to balls on rebounds,” Boyle said. “The tightness may have come come through with the free throw shooting, but again, we’ve been a great free throw shooting team all year.”

Schwartz said Sunday that he thinks the team was too fired up, just like Boyle does.

“We did want it too bad,” Schwartz said. “We were a little tight in the locker room. We weren’t playing music, we weren’t doing what we normally do. So we’re just going to get back to the plan.”

Wright said the “tightness” carried into the game.

“I feel like we weren’t having as much fun as we usually do,” Wright said. “We were so uptight and we wanted it so bad that we were frustrated with every little mistake. We have to understand that mistakes are part of the game. We have to tighten up our defense the way we are capable of doing and just be ourselves.”

Be yourself was, essentially, Tad Boyle’s message when he spoke with the team Saturday night and it will continue to be his message this week.

“We don’t have to raise our game up another level,” Boyle said. “We’ve just got to play the way we’re capable of playing. And if each player plays to their ability and we can continue to play together on offense and, and dial into our defensive gameplan, we can win.”

Hopefully Colorado learned its lesson and will be ready to go when it takes on Georgetown in the Round of 64 on Saturday.

“When we’re having fun and we’re getting stops and getting out to run that’s when we’re at our best and that’s when we’re having the most fun,” Wright said.