When Fort Hays State came to Boulder for its only exhibition game of the season on Saturday, Colorado basketball perhaps expected an easy win over its Division II visitors. Enter Rob Davis, who quickly put those suspicions to rest in the second half.
Despite a monster performance from the FHSU senior, the Buffs relied on their earlier 21-point cushion to get the job done, 81-71, as they advanced to 8-3 overall.
“I told our team after the game that our coaching staff, we’ve been here for seven years now. This is our seventh year, and this team has two things going for it right now,” head coach Tad Boyle said. “Number one, they own the most disappointing loss in that seven-year span in the Colorado State game a few weeks ago. Now, they can also add to that that they own the most disappointing win, which is the Fort Hays State game here today.”
Throughout the entire first half, FHSU (7-4) star Davis didn’t make any noise on offense. But in the second half, the 5’11” phenom caught fire and couldn’t be stopped as he scored 29 points in just 18 minutes. Hadley Gillum also finished with 15 points.
The 29 points was the most scored in a single half in Coors Events Center history.
“Thank God Davis didn’t play very well in the first half, didn’t play very much, because he would have had 50 on us,” Boyle said. “We had nobody to guard him.”
On the Colorado side of the ball, four players notched double-digit performances as fifth-year seniors Xavier Johnson and Josh Fortune and freshman Deleon Brown led the Buffs with 15 points apiece, which was complemented by senior Derrick White’s 10-point, six assist performance.
“I felt pretty good. I felt loose, and my teammates found me when I was open and I was able to make shots,” Brown said.
Brown’s 15 points set a career-high for the young guard, who came into Saturday’s game with a former nine-point career mark score against Louisiana-Monroe .
“He deserves more playing time than he’s gotten and guess what, he got it tonight and he did a pretty good job,” Boyle said.
Despite largely out-sizing the Tigers, the Buffs only nabbed four more rebounds with 40 to the Tigers’ 36. What they lacked off the glass, however, they made up for in offense as they finished the night with 43.1 percent shooting to FHSU’s 40 percent.
From start to finish, the Buffs commanded control of the game as they never let Fort Hays State come close to touching a lead. For the first five and a half minutes of the game, the Tigers didn’t score at all, until sophomore guard Gillum sunk a midrange jumper.
By the second media timeout, the Tigers had only made one of its 15 shots. Not much changed after that.
It took them over 11 minutes to hit double digits as the Buffs kept surmounting a larger lead. By halftime, the Buffs had built up their largest lead of the game thus far, 39-22, but that was apt to change once play resumed in the second half.
Barely into the second portion of play, the Buffs amassed as much as a 21-point lead, 43-22, before Fort Hays started thawing out on offense. Over the next four minutes, the Tigers ignited on a 17-4 scoring tangent, including a 7-0 stint, to bring Colorado’s lead back down to single-digits, 47-39.
That glory in Colorado (for For Hays) didn’t last long, though it didn’t completely vanish.
Thanks to a monster run from Davis, the Tigers broke single-digits again with under three minutes left on the clock, 76-67. If you took Davis out of the picture, the Buffs would have held a 38-point lead instead of a nine-point lead.
“We have to dictate defensively,” Boyle said. “If we can’t dictate against Fort Hays, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to dictate against Utah or Arizona State or Arizona or anybody in the Pac-12.”
By the time the final buzzer sounded, the Buffs ran away with an 81-71 win. They head next to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on Monday, Dec. 19, at 7 p.m.
“This is a—I wouldn’t say a bad win, but this is an eye-opener for us,” King said.
“We don’t have the mental toughness to put anybody away. We don’t have the mental toughness to play two halves back to back. That’s obvious,” Boyle said. “Now we better either figure it out or it’s going to be an up and down year.”
