BuffZone writer Pat Rooney discusses three topics surrounding CU Buffs athletics with a huge week of hoops set to unfold at the CU Events Center.
Hoops heaven
It will be a week unlike any other at the CU Events Center.
In the first top-10 matchup at CU for either of the Buffaloes’ basketball teams in almost 30 years, the CU women’s team held off No. 8 Stanford on Sunday in one of the more electric home atmospheres for a women’s game in some time. It was only a preview of things to come.
After going nearly 30 years between top-10 matchups at the Events Center, it will take all of five days for the arena to host another. CU, up to No. 3 in this week’s top 25, hosts No. 5 UCLA on Friday. Two days later, No. 6 USC comes to town. Sunday’s attendance of 9,111 was the fourth-largest ever for a women’s regular season game and the ninth-largest overall at the Events Center for a women’s game. Chances are, that list of all-time crowds soon will be updated again.
The week kicks off with a men’s battle that counts as the biggest home game of the season so far as Oregon, alone atop the Pac-12 with a 5-0 league mark, visits the CU on Thursday night. The Buffs’ comeback win against USC on Saturday night drew a season-high 10,005 fans, the third-highest attendance for a men’s game since the start of the 2021-22 season.
The women are 8-0 at home. The men are 10-0. It’s setting up to be a special January-March run at the Events Center, especially if the men’s team can shake off its recent inconsistencies to make the sort of run coach Tad Boyle and his Buffaloes have been expecting.
Early front-runner
CU women’s coach JR Payne has successfully created a bubble of tunnel vision around her team. The Buffs probably won’t be caught looking ahead to Sunday’s game against No. 6 USC during Friday’s matchup against No. 5 UCLA any more than they looked ahead to the Bruins before dispatching Stanford on Sunday.
Still, the opportunity at hand for the Buffs cannot be overstated. Picking up wins against the two Los Angeles schools would give CU a perfect 4-0 mark at home against the Pac-12’s other top four teams (also Stanford and Utah). In the unbalanced schedule of an 18-game league slate, that 4-0 cushion against the other Pac-12 contenders would be huge going into February. Stanford doesn’t have to play the Los Angeles schools on the road but hosts USC and UCLA in early February. USC and UCLA already have split their season series (the home team won both times) and host the Buffs in late February.
Certainly a perfect run through this week’s formidable foes clinches nothing for the CU women. But in a rugged conference race, the Buffs could soon play their way into an envious position of the team being chased, instead of having to pick up tough road wins in order to do the chasing down the stretch.
Glowing obituary
By now, most fans probably have reconciled with the pending demise of the Pac-12. The Buffs soon will be returning to familiar turf in the Big 12, and the shock from the latest round of conference realignment that unfolded last summer has long since settled.
Still, the league presidents and ineffectual commissioner George Kliavkoff have to be collectively ashamed at how they were unable to keep the conference intact amid such resounding on-field success. Washington made just the third appearance for the Pac-12 in 10 years of the College Football Playoff, becoming the second Pac-12 team to reach the title game. The women’s basketball race should be epic, with the Pac-12 certainly among the favorites to perhaps land multiple Final Four spots. The luster of the men’s race has been dulled somewhat by the astounding struggles of the two Los Angeles teams. But with Arizona proving mortal in recent weeks with road losses at Stanford and Washington State, and upstarts like Oregon, Arizona State and Stanford playing their way into early contention, the men’s race might not be any less dramatic.
These western staples of NCAA athletics might never compete against one another this way again. Enjoy these final months while you can.
