FORT COLLINS — The Mountain West is shaping up to be a gauntlet of angry polar bears carrying rusty chainsaws. So when a bad loss bared a rank, beastly smile of yellowed teeth, flexed its scaly muscles and shot the CSU Rams a steely glare, thank goodness it also forgot the golden rule of Moby Arena:
Don’t ever get into a staring contest with Isaiah Stevens at home.
Ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
“(I’d said), ‘Listen, guys, you’re gonna be in close games all year,’” Coach Niko Medved reflected after his Rammies (14-3, 2-2 MW) escaped one of those unsightly Mountain West losses, rallying to a 78-69 win over Air Force (7-9, 0-4) late Tuesday.
“I mean, look at our league right now. Every game is really, really difficult, and wins are just precious. And so we found a way.”
Veteran point guards find a way. Especially now. Stevens’ steal at midcourt with six seconds left in regulation set up a Nique Clifford layup to force overtime, and the senior’s silky jumper from the baseline with 2:34 left in the extra period cinched a sigh of relief for the 6,345 faithful who’d braved a bone-chilling cold.
Stevens’ heroics snapped a two-game CSU losing streak and, more importantly, spared the locals watching a second straight overtime defeat to lowly AFA — NCAA NET ranking as of Tuesday morning: 239th in the country — on Plum Street.
“This is not a beauty contest. It’s not a dance competition. It’s basketball. It’s hard to win,” Medved continued. “And you’ve just got to find a way to grind out wins. And somehow we did.”
While the Rammies were sweating, a salty Utah State team was getting clobbered at New Mexico and Boise State got ambushed at home by UNLV. When the waves in conference play are this choppy, brother, you want a steady hand at the wheel.
Stevens finished with 12 points, notching his 13th straight game with double-digit scoring, along with nine assists, three boards and two steals. And as elite coaches on the floor so often do, the Texan saved his best for last, taking over a game late that he’d started by missing three of his first four shots.
Air Force huffed and puffed its way to a 58-55 lead with 3:04 left when the Rams’ Jalen Lake drained a triple from the right wing, dropping through after a high doink off the rim and a hometown bounce to knot the score. The Falcons answered quickly, as a hook by AFA forward Beau Becker was true — Zoomies 60, Rammies 58 — and CSU came away with nada on its next five trips down the floor.
Straits looked dire with 25 seconds left and the hosts down 64-60. But Clifford drained two foul shots with 20 seconds on the clock, setting up a chaotic full-court press and a Stevens takeaway. The point man spotted Clifford cutting to the right of the lane and the latter laid it in, squaring the score again at 64 apiece. AFA missed two looks down low in the final four ticks, to the relief of the Moby mob.
“I knew (Stevens) was going to throw it up,” offered Clifford, the former CU Buff who put up a team-high 17 points. “I was just thinking, ‘Make this shot, send this game to overtime so we can have a chance.’”
CSU was trying to get the taste of a two-game road losing funk out of its collective maws, a week removed from a court-storming defeat at Boise (65-58) last Tuesday, its second such setback in about 90 hours.
But Air Force, Princeton of the Peaks, is a sneaky-bad draw when you’re coming off a break, let alone a slump. The Rams run. The Falcons plod. AFA’s game plan is to drag you into a rock fight, gnawing the clock and your soul slowly, like a hyena, one backdoor cut at a time.
The Zoomies built a 7-3 lead, then 16-8, then 25-13. The second AFA cushion, coming on the heels a 9-2 Falcons run, forced a timeout and left Medved looking hot enough to melt the ice on Hagues Peak.
“(He’d) told us the first little bit (was) gonna be a struggle to kind of get in the flow and that’s what they do,” Rams forward Joel Scott said later. “They might guard the same action four different ways. So it’s kind of hard to get in that flow. But, yeah, once we kind of figured it out, we started getting into the flow and we could get in the paint and get to the free throw line more.”
CSU, which went into Tuesday second nationally in field-goal percentage (52.0) and 38th in 3-point shooting accuracy (37.4), got lulled into missing 16 of its first 24 attempts from the floor before the law of averages woke up. Up 27-15, the Falcons staggered into a familiar run of unkind iron, helping the hosts scratch and crawl their way back via a 9-0 run over the final four minutes of the first stanza.
“Again, I’ll give them credit for taking us out of that part of our offense,” Medved said. “And sometimes, it’s just as simple as a few shots going down, right?
“Joel Scott, I thought, was terrific — got some huge offensive rebounds. Joe Palmer got some huge offensive rebounds. And sometimes, you need a couple things to go your way just to kind of get your mojo back, so to speak.”
Timely shooting by Palmer (11 points, five boards) kept the Rammies hanging around. But it was his sky-high block of Becker with 10:46 left in the game that got the home crowd on their feet, sparking an 11-5 run for the hosts.
“Those last five minutes, we found our toughness,” Scott noted. “(We) found our groove a little bit.”
You don’t want to miss bunnies at home, ideally. Or a chance to get healthy against a Zoomies bunch that came in having lost six straight. The Rams have seven games yet to come, home and away, with teams that went into Tuesday ranked among the top 45 schools in the NET ratings, one of the leading criterion for the NCAA tourney’s Selection Committee.
For context, the Buffs, at present, have just three “show-me” top 45 tilts left — Utah (No. 24) twice and Arizona (No. 2) at home. That confounding loss at Cal has lodged The Fighting Tads on the wrong side of the Bracketville bubble, and the Pac-12, with UCLA and USC sucking wind, might not be deep enough to provide much of a lifeline.
CSU dodged a Cal moment of its own, thanks in part to Stevens. Bad losses never quit. And nobody learns to advance in March without surviving January first.
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