Colorado Can’t Handle Kansas

The offense remains a problem

The offensive problems remain Colorado lost at Kansas, as most teams do, on Saturday night at Allen Fieldhouse.

That wasn’t a surprise. Nothing about Saturday’s game was a surprise. The No. 2 Jayhawks beat the No. 20 Buffaloes 72-58.

Colorado is a poor offensive team that had won its first seven games off a combination of excellent defense and a weak schedule.

The Buffaloes has not faced a team nearly as talented as Kansas this year, and it showed. CU was tentative, physically overmatched and turnover prone in a game that revealed the difference between No. 2 and No. 20. 

It was impossible to watch Saturday’s game and not imagine what things would be like if Tyler Bey were a dangerous 3-point shooter. It would change everything.

My land.

I’d Bey were the kind of guy who would shoot a 3 every time he’s open and could make ... oh ... 35 percent of them, this would be a team without a glaring weakness and one that would be highly annoying to play against.

Nobody would be able to play two bigs against CU the way KU did Saturday, Bey would be twice as difficult to guard on a one-on-one level, and there wouldn’t be so much pressure on CU’s guards.

But that’s not his game.

Which means Colorado can’t deal with the elite teams in the country. Those teams all have shooters. Colorado has a great defense, some good post guys and a reliable point guard.

But there’s a huge component missing from that — shooting.

Unless there’s a massive lineup shakeup that’s not going to change for CU the rest of the year, and that beans there’s a lid on things for the Buffaloes. You can only ft so good playing this way, and Colorado is there. 

This is a veteran team that knows what it’s doing and has played together. There’s not a lot of potential left to pull out of this group.

A lineup change would probably wreck the defense, and that puts coach Tad Boyle into a tough spot.

The Buffaloes can probably survive for a while on defense, but by March something is going to have to shake loose in the other end.