The Ralphie Report

Recapping Colorado Buffaloes Basketball & Athletics News, Links, and Stories

AllBuffs - Covering The University of Colorado Athletics - This Week In BasketBuffs - 2/6/12

Huge week ahead for both teams. Sound familiar? I'm starting to think I can just copy & paste the opening paragraph every week. I know there's been casual talk about making the tournament for the men's team this year, but if there's ANY chance of it happening, we have to win at Arizona on Thursday.

Steal a win there and suddenly dreams of dancing can enter the equation. Arizona is starting to look like the team that made them a popular pick to win the PAC-12 in the pre-season... ...Statistically, there aren't many weaknesses on the Arizona team.

As for Arizona State, they suck. There is zero excuse for us to lose to them in Tempe on Saturday, and that's what terrifies me. They're 221st in the KenPom rankings. The USC team that we took behind the woodshed in LA a few weeks ago is 202nd. So ASU is bad. Here's hoping the Buffs don't have a let down after the Arizona game.

Buffs sitting in right position - Buffzone

On the road to (March) madness? Colorado has put itself in position to win the Pac-12 regular-season title with a 7-0 record against its new conference foes at the Coors Events Center. This is the first time the program has been in contention this late in a season since 1996-97 when Chauncey Billups was a sophomore at CU.

The surprising 2012 championship chase began with a laugher against Utah (73-33) and continued with a dramatic last-second win over Oregon (72-71) on Saturday night in front of 11,052 believers. The Buffs (16-7, 8-3) have now played everyone in the Pac-12 and are currently tied with Cal for second place, one game behind a Washington team they buried 87-69 in Boulder.

"I don't think there is any team we can't beat," second-year CU head coach Tad Boyle said after improving his remarkable home record to 31-3. "But I don't think there is any team we can take for granted either. I think the whole key for us is you take the next task at hand and we have to beat a quality opponent on the road." CU will have a chance to do just that on national television against Arizona on Thursday (7 p.m., ESPN).

Spring Forward " CU At the Game - A CU Football blog by Stuart Whitehair

The lack of running backs is matched by the lack of fullbacks on the roster. Red-shirt freshman Nick Plimpton, an invited walk-on, is the only fullback who returns from last season. Enter true freshman Clay Norgard, a member of the recruiting Class of 2012, who enrolled early and will be available for spring practices. Come August, the running back corps will not be so depleted, with three freshmen running backs added to the roster, to go with another fullback.

Donta Abron, Davien Payne, and Terrence Crowder will join the team as tailbacks, with Christian Powell joining Norgard at fullback. (Injury Update: Crowder was injured five plays into his senior season, and underwent surgery last September. His rehabilitation is going so well that he expects to run track this spring, and be 100% ready for drills this August).

Pressing Questions -

1) Will Tony Jones be able to build upon his strong finish to his freshman campaign, staking out a claim for the No. 1 tailback position come September?;

2) Will Clay Norgard be able to adjust from high school football to the college game quickly enough for Colorado to have confidence to install the pro-style offense head coach Jon Embree and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy wish to run?

Follow the jump for irrefutable proof that the world will end in 2012...

Buddy Ryan’s "Polish Goalline" tactic | Smart Football - If you watched the Super Bowl, this is about the Giant's too-many-men penalty that bled half the remaining time off the clock.

Reader Alex sent in the below page from Buddy Ryan’s old Houston Oilers playbook. I have to say I haven’t seen this tactic before. Count the number of defenders...

You know the Giants can count; both players and seconds. Perhaps this is what CU's 8 DL recruits presages.

News not fit to print - The Blog of the NCAA - This blog post is a return-fire salvo from the NCAA at a New York Times columnist in an internet slappy fight, but I clipped it primarily for one phrase (emphasis added)

The NCAA should not be immune to criticism. Any organization this big and complicated is going to need frequent corrective action. But while the NCAA is not always right, neither is it always wrong, which brings us to Joe Nocera’s month-long, error-laden and questionably motivated mugging in The New York Times. Again, remember that we’re talking about the New York Times, not Deadspin. These days, sadly, it’s hard to tell the difference.

USC Trojans earn top spot in latest 2012 look - ESPN - Proof the world will end in 2012; USC is atop the new ESPN rankings...

College football's recruiting season is in the rearview mirror, and many of the country's top teams have restocked the cupboards for runs at conference titles and BCS bowl games. Which freshmen are the next Sammy Watkins and Jadeveon Clowney?

Even the country's best teams might need immediate help from freshmen to make a serious run at the 2013 BCS championship. USC, which signed a solid class despite limited scholarship numbers, moves into the No. 1 spot of the second edition of the Way-Too-Early Preseason Top 25, after LSU seemed to lose a lot of its momentum after losing to Alabama 21-0 in the Allstate BCS National Championship Game on Jan. 9.

Pac-12 extends commissioner Larry Scott's contract through 2016 - ESPN

The Pac-12 board of directors unanimously decided to extend the contract of commissioner Larry Scott through 2016, the conference said Monday morning.

This is not surprising, though the fact that it's nowhere to be seen on the Pac-12 webpage is.

Pac-12 Confidential | Pac-12 Networks: How to get rich quick | Seattle Times Newspaper

Many folks, myself included, stumble a bit on the fine details of sports-television contracts. We tend to focus on the pragmatic - as in, Is the game I want to watch on the channels I have available? Well, the Pac-12 last week announced its new president of Pac-12 Enterprises, 54-year-old Gary Stevenson, whose first responsibility is building and overseeing the conference TV networks set to launch in a year.

That led me to AJ Maestas, whose Chicago-based company, Navigate Marketing, does media research and measurement. Maestas -- a Washington grad, by the way - had a fairly jaw-dropping forecast on the future of the Pac-12 Networks, putting it in numbers that the most uninitiated of us can understand.

"Off the top of my head, four years from today, I would not be surprised if the Pac-12 schools saw $12-15 million distribution (each) from the Pac-12 Networks," Maestas said. "The truth is, it could actually be 30-40 percent higher than that." That's a thunderbolt. You knew already of the 12-year, $3-billion ESPN-and-Fox deal engineered by Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott in the spring.

When it begins to take place a year from now, that's going to be worth roughly $21 million annually for each team in the league. But the network, which Scott announced late in July, has been a fuzzier concept. I'd say $12-15 million brings a lot more clarity.

Post-signing day Power Rankings - Pac-12 Blog - ESPN

12. Colorado: The Buffaloes remain at the bottom because the bottom line is this: They welcome back 13 starters from a team that went 3-10 and ranked last in both scoring offense and scoring defense. Still, coach Jon Embree put together a solid recruiting class, one that could become the foundation of his substantial rebuilding project.

Here for complete-ness' sake. Yyeeech.

News is Slow in Boulder, so the Camera needed to recycle this article: Former CU Buff Lynn Katoa makes Boulder Police Department's most-wanted list - Buffzone

When Lynn Katoa arrived in Boulder in 2008, he was a talented high school recruit listed by many scouting websites as one of the top linebackers in the nation. Now, after numerous run-ins with police, Katoa finds himself on a different kind of list: Boulders most wanted.

Buffs Take Lead At UAA Invitational - CUBuffs.com - Official Athletics Web site of the University of Colorado

The defending national champion University of Colorado ski team, with a win in women’s Nordic competition and three top six finishes on the men’s side, took the early lead after two events in the Alaska Invitational here Saturday. There may not be a Colorado-Utah rivalry yet in the Pac-12 Conference, but it’s heated up in skiing this year, as Utah edged the Buffs in the first two meets and the two are dueling here after the classical races. The Buffaloes have 231 points with the Utes on their heels with 228; Montana State (208), Alaska (187), Denver (171) and New Mexico (157) round out the field.

Go Buffs!