It’s difficult to point to Sunday’s loss as a season low-point for the Colorado Buffaloes men’s basketball team, given the club has squandered last-minute leads in four of its eight Pac-12 Conference losses so far.
Yet with two of the Buffs’ senior leaders, Xavier Johnson and Wesley Gordon, sitting on the bench in sweats — suspended for undisclosed team violations — CU’s 77-66 defeat at Cal provided another new and inexplicable hurdle for a squad that is watching its NCAA Tournament goals slowly fade.
With seven games remaining in the regular season, CU returns home saddled with a 13-11 overall mark and a 3-8 record in the Pac-12. Outside a lackluster league-opening loss at Utah, the Buffs generally have fought the good fight despite the myriad issues — sometimes rebounding, sometimes defense, and now poor decisions by two fifth-year seniors — that have dogged the team all season.
Even an optimistic view of a 6-1 finish to the regular season probably won’t thrust the Buffs on to the tournament bubble, meaning they also would need to either upset No. 5 Oregon on the road or make significant noise in the Pac-12 tournament in Las Vegas.
CU entered Monday with an RPI ranking of 106, well off the tournament radar. Yet even as the prognosis grows bleaker, head coach Tad Boyle and his players are not concerned their effort will lag.
“Moving forward, we all need everyone to step up like we did (Sunday) and hopefully the outcome is different,” junior Tory Miller said. “We could’ve folded plenty of times. This team has a never-say-die attitude.”
Five of CU’s final seven regular-season games are at home. Four of those seven are against teams currently in the bottom half of the Pac-12 standings. An opportunity remains for the Buffs to make a push but time is running out — especially since Boyle indicated after Sunday’s game the status of suspended seniors Johnson and Gordon remains up in the air as the week begins.
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