The last time the Colorado Buffaloes won in Lawrence, Tad Boyle was playing for Kansas.
He’s now in his 15th year as the head coach at CU and they’re still waiting to win there again.
Nothing was easy for 17th-ranked KU on Tuesday night at Allen Fieldhouse on either side of the ball, and the Jayhawks let the Buffaloes — who are now 0-13 in Big 12 play — remain in contention throughout the second half. But it still went down as a win for KU by a score of 71-59.
“I asked Danny (Manning) yesterday in the office, ‘You ever been on the opposing bench?'” Boyle said. “He said he hasn’t. I said, ‘Well, it’s not quite as much fun.’ At least in my experience as the head coach at Colorado here.”
Center Hunter Dickinson supplied his reliable 19 points and nine rebounds, and guard Zeke Mayo added 13 with nine boards and five assists. Senior forward KJ Adams played his best all-around basketball since returning from a separated shoulder and tallied 10 points, five rebounds and five assists.
“It was a W,” KU coach Bill Self said. “It was pretty bland. I thought the most exciting plays of the game no question was when we could get the ball to KJ on short rolls, where he could show his explosiveness, because everything else was just kind of ‘get through it.'”
CU’s typical leading scorer Julian Hammond III mustered just two points on 1-for-6 shooting, but freshman forward Sebastian Rancik went off for a career-best 19, and Bangot Dak and Elijah Malone vexed the Jayhawks in the post at times to score 11 and 10, respectively
The Jayhawks looked sharp enough on offense in the early going but couldn’t build much distance from the Buffaloes, in part because of six early points from Rancik, who entered the night averaging 5.1 per game on the season. He finished a three-point play off a foul by Rylan Griffen that tied the game at 10 entering the under-16 timeout.
After briefly trailing, KU scored seven straight, aided by a series of turnovers, before conceding a putback to Malone.
Dajuan Harris Jr. broke the Jayhawks out of a dull offensive stretch with a drive to the hoop that made it 21-16, and as CU’s own scoring drought crossed the three-minute mark, AJ Storr connected on a no-hesitation corner 3.
Down the stretch in the first half, Adams took over. He fought through a foul for a tough layup, fed Dickinson on an alley-oop and leapt to block a layup by Assane Diop. When Mayo caught a defender jumping in transition and found Adams inside for another dunk to make it 31-20, CU coach Tad Boyle had to call a timeout.
The Jayhawks entered the break with a 40-26 advantage after Dickinson put back an errant 3-pointer by Harris through a foul with 5.7 seconds remaining, although he missed the ensuing free throw.
Andrej Jakimovski hit 3-pointers on each of Colorado’s first two second-half possessions as part of an immediate 10-2 run, aided by a stretch in which Dickinson had to play with one shoe on, and then Jakimovski and David Coit started trading blows.
“Fortunately, we played Diggy enough where he had the chance to shoot the ball a little bit,” Self said. “Those eight points he scored for us in the second half were very important.”
The Buffaloes got as close as they had been since midway through the half when Malone scored back-to-back buckets against Flory Bidunga to cut KU’s lead to just 50-45.
“The thing about it is, he’s not strong enough to guard 50, so you got to play 50 before he catches it,” Self said. “He didn’t play him before he caught it tonight, gets dead behind, gets buried, the guy makes 3-footers.”
A well-timed switch to zone defense by CU slowed the pace of the Jayhawks’ offense to a crawl. Colorado, meanwhile, went more than four minutes without a field goal, but KU’s own struggles to score were such that it only went up 10 points in the interim.
CU was able to trade buckets with KU for extended stretches, but Mayo’s 3-pointer with 2:35 to go, combined with an inbound lob to Adams that made it 69-56, essentially ensured the Buffaloes would run out of time.
“Were we better in some ways? Yes,” Self said. “But was it a consistent way of doing things? No.”
The Jayhawks, who improved to 17-7 and 8-5 in Big 12 play, will travel to face league newcomer Utah on Saturday at 9 p.m. Central Time.
