FORT COLLINS, CO. — Colorado State men’s basketball is no longer a team on the rise.
Sure, with a roster featuring just two upperclassmen — neither of which are seniors — the future is bright. But with road wins over San Diego State and Utah State, and now a 22-point beatdown of Boise State to their name, the Rams have officially arrived.
As things currently stand, CSU sits just half a game out of first place in the Mountain West. A second win over the Broncos at home Friday night would push the Rams ahead of the Broncos in the league standings. What’s encouraging for the Green & Gold is that CSU’s final nine games are much less daunting than their counterparts at the top of the leaderboard too.
Regardless of Friday’s outcome, the Rams will still ultimately need to take care of business down the stretch. “The worst thing you can do is get too far ahead yourself or start looking out into the future,” Niko Medved said earlier this week. “All these games are difficult.”
Considering losing multiple winnable games would all but guarantee that CSU gets left out of the NCAA Tournament — at least as an at-large bid — the goal really is to win the Mountain West Conference regular season title, though, or at least go down swinging.
“Anyone who is involved in college basketball at our level, we think about the NCAA Tournament 365 days a year. You think about it every day. You’d be lying if you don’t,” Medved said.
Obviously, we never know how a hypothetical Mountain West Tournament would play out. With how the Rams have played against elite competition so far, one would imagine they’d handle themselves pretty well. That said, given the state of the pandemic, there’s just no guarantee that the event will even take place.
“There’s conversations going on right now. I think we need to be agile,” Medved said in response to the potential of a conference tournament not being played.
“This is such a different year. I think it’s hard to say set in stone that this is what needs to happen. We’re not even into February yet.”
Whether the league decides to host the annual single-elimination tournament in Sin City or not, a 20-win season would give the Rams an extremely competitive resume — especially considering how few non-conference opportunities CSU had to pad the win total. For now, though, it’s just fun to have a team that is legitimately in contention.
The last couple of years have not been easy on the Ram Faithful. Really, much of the last decade has been pretty difficult. But with the men’s and women’s teams presently rocking a combined record of 23-5 (16-4 vs. the MW), the fine folks in FoCo are once again feeling “Proud to Be”.
It’s not often that groups go on special runs like this, and Ram Nation is fortunate enough to have a pair of teams putting together campaigns to remember. When the dust settles and the season comes to a close, there will be time to evaluate whether they ended up reaching their respective potential or not. But the time to enjoy the moment is definitely now.
Soak it up, Ram fans. A new era is finally here.
