Strike 1: Tad Boyle doesn’t get his due.
If you know Boyle even a little bit, you know the veteran head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes men’s basketball team is not a fan of the way college athletics has morphed into another version of professional sports. Tad is old school.
Which makes what he continues to do as the GOAT of CU basketball coaches all that more impressive.
This old dog has learned important new tricks.
Consider this: Last season, the Buffs produced three NBA players, including two first-round picks. They won a program-record 22 regular season games, and another two in the Pac-12 tournament (where they made it to the championship game) and then two more still in the NCAA tournament, including knocking off 7th-seeded Florida and making it to the round of 32.
No CU fan should have been unhappy with the season or the final 26-11 record.
They accomplished all that with a standout “one-and-done” guy in freshman Cody Williams, and with two other guys, Tristan de Silva and KJ Simpson, who’d been program mainstays for three and four seasons respectively. Williams and de Silva were firstround picks, and Simpson went in Round 2.
Only two other programs produced three NBA draft picks last season.
You’d think that having that kind of success would make players eager to be in Boulder and play for the Buffs. But alas, that’s not the era we live in now. Players and egos are fickle. Boyle saw four other key players transfer out, including Eddie Lampkin Jr, Luke O’Brien and J’Vonne Hadly, presumably for “greener” pastures.
That left CU with zero returning starters as the program returned to the rugged Big 12. While the Buffs old/new conference may not be a top flight football conference, it’s as close as you can get to being the best college basketball conference in the country. CU was picked to finish 15th in the new 16-team conference this season.
So what does Boyle do to start this season? He takes an entire new stable of Buffaloes out to Hawaii and beats the defending national champion UConn Huskies at the Maui invitational. Then the Buffs returned home and avenged last season’s loss to rival Colorado State in a big way, 72-55. To be fair, the Rams also lost all but one starter, including stalwart guard Isaiah Stevens off last year’s NCAA Tournament team. The Rams simply haven’t rebuilt on the fly nearly as well as CU has. The Buffs stand at 7-2 after that win, and appear properly geared up for the meat grinder that will be the Big 12 slate. There are two more non-conference games before that grind begins with top-10 ranked Iowa State (who has already defeated CU in Hawaii.)
The new names to watch are Julian Hammond III, Bangot Dak, RJ Smith, Assane Diop and Trevor Baskin. Take the time to get familiar.
No one is going to predict that this CU team will match what last year’s did, but with Boyle working his magic, they will no doubt surprise a few bigger names teams along the way. And the future, as always, looks bright.
The bottom line is this: Colorado fans that complain about Boyle (and all fan bases gripe about their head coach along the way) are wrong. Everyone should step back and evaluate his body of work. He’s the winningest coach in CU history, posting more than 300 wins and a 61% winning percentage in this, his 15th season. His six trips to the NCAA Tournament are the most of any CU coach.
Boyle knows he can’t build his roster the way he used to, by signing top flight high school talent and letting it develop. Those days are over. He may detest the “one-and-done” scenario, but clearly he’s learned to accept and work with it. He’s not as comfortable dealing with the transfer portal as his football counterpart, but he’s going to do that too, when necessary.
When the day comes that Tad Boyle decides to hang up his clipboard, CU fans will step back and realize they’d been watching the best coach in school history do some pretty great stuff.
