One season ago, Colorado coach Tad Boyle entered the Pac-12 tournament as the No. 3 seed brandishing a roster featuring three future NBA draft picks.
But heading into this week’s Big 12 tournament in Kansas City, Mo., the Buffaloes are the 16th seed just looking to play one day more. The Buffaloes (12-19) face No. 12 seed TCU (16-15) Tuesday in the second game of the first round.
The winner will move on to face eighth seed West Virginia.
Colorado closed the regular season Saturday with an emphatic 76-56 victory over TCU, which snapped a three-game losing streak. The Buffaloes went 3-4 down the stretch after losing their first 13 Big 12 games.
A quartet of seniors led the way for the Buffs against the Horned Frogs. Julian Hammond III scored 19 points and tied a career high with seven assists. Trevor Baskin grabbed 16 rebounds, the most by any Colorado player this season. Javon Ruffin was 3-of-4 from 3-point range for nine points while Andrej Jakimovski grabbed eight rebounds.
“I’m really happy for our seniors,” Boyle said. “We really challenged our guys (Saturday) to play for them. (We said) ‘Get out of yourself, don’t worry about you and let’s give everything we got for those five guys.’ I thought our guys did that and played well.”
TCU lost its last two games and four of its last five, thereby eliminating any chance of a Big 12 first-round bye. The loss at Colorado wasn’t as much about losing by 20 as it was about giving up a 25-8 run in the final 10:11 of the game.
“It just got away from us,” TCU head coach Jamie Dixon said. “We missed some free throws, which were rally-killers. In that last (10-) minute stretch, everything went wrong for us. What we wanted to do didn’t go the way we wanted it to go. I don’t know that we made a shot in the last eight or nine minutes.”
The Horned Frogs, who hit just 31.6 percent from the field, get another chance Tuesday to see whether they can make shots. Noah Reynolds, who leads the Horned Frogs at 12.3 points per game, was one of their hotter players at 5-for-13 against the Buffaloes.
–Field Level Media
