The Dish: Rams Do What's Absolutely Needed

FORT COLLINS, Colo. – The night wasn't going to be perfect. That would be an impossible ask.

Not with 24 days between games. Not with just three full practices under their belt. Not facing Air Force and its matchup zone and Princeton offense.

Tuesday was going to be a night of frustrating moments for Colorado State's men's basketball team, and the Rams were going to have to handle them.

Which they did. Not perfectly, and it was not always pretty. But it was a 67-59 win, an 11^th consecutive to start the season for the No. 20 team in the country. At the end of the night, what was most important was still intact.

"We did enough," CSU head coach Niko Medved said. "At the end of the day we did enough to win, and that's the most important thing here today."

The Rams are 11-0, and just as important, off to a 1-0 start to Mountain West play. While the program was in the middle of a COVID pause, it went from unranked to climbing in the polls, missing the final two scheduled non-conference games as well as the conference opener.

They couldn't practice the whole time, either, not with protocols. Isaiah Stevens said you can ride the bike as much as you want, or run sprints, but nothing prepares one for game action like a game itself. They just didn't have those.

And moving forward, they're not sure if what is schedule will be played, starting with Friday's road date with Boise State. Medved said it could be moved to later in the weekend, and they are actively looking for a replacement should it be needed Friday.

What they need is games. Tuesday showed as much. It also proved the Rams have calm in tense moments.

The Rams played stingy defense at times, forcing a handful of shot-clock violations by the Falcons. They also gave up backdoor cuts. Everybody does, but it doesn't make it any easier to accept. Those sting, and they were created more moments of frustration than they wanted.

"A lot. Those backdoor cuts are demoralizing, because you play good defense the whole possession, and they have a unique style, so they just keep running their sets and all the sudden they get a backdoor layup with 5 seconds on the clock, and it's like, it's kind of a backbreaker," Chandler Jacobs said. "But that's what tough teams do. We want to be a tough team, we're a good team, so we've got to keep going."

Colorado State did. They didn't back down giving up the first seven points of the game. They cringed as a shorthanded Air Force team hit 10-of-21 shots from deep. They cringed as they shot just 40.4 percent for the game (they came in at 53.3 percent) and at home, even.

It wasn't just the physical toll they felt, or that Medved witnessed. There was some emotional baggage to deal with, too.

"I'm going to keep on saying it: We were sharp enough to win, but we weren't all the way locked in to where we needed to be," Isaiah Stevens said. "We haven't played in a while, so that's going to come."

Just the way his 1,000^th career point was going to in the game. He only needed six points, which he knew, but when he collected a steal at midcourt and drove for a layup, he didn't know that was the exact basket, at least not until the timeout which immediately followed and his teammates congratulated him.

His teammate, David Roddy, did the same thing the game before. Who knew more than 20 days would separate the competitions, however.

But every dagger which came Colorado State's way, they dodged. They gutted it out, which Medved was not going to lose sight of by any measure.

"Emotional toughness and maturity is a huge deal, and these guys have that," he said. "There's frustration all the time; you want it to be better and stuff. Again, a lot of that is our opponent and the way they play and the kind of game they brought. Even though it wasn't always there physically the way you wanted it to, I thought our guys emotionally stayed with it."

Now, when the two play again, he'll expect them to be better. He will expect more discipline on both ends of the floor. At times, the game got away from them, but not for long, and not to any detrimental degree.

Best of all, he watched them compete and play hard. He felt his team mustered up everything they had to give, which naturally, isn't everything they normally have. Some nights are like that, just not under this specific set of circumstances.

But Stevens scored 15 points and dealt out a pair of assists. And Roddy had his 18^th career double-double, his fourth of the season. Jacobs gave them important minutes with six points, too. There were a lot of little things on a night with no real big things, but those added up.

Which was all that really mattered.

"Just win the game. That was the most important thing, that's what we kept talking about during our timeouts is find a way to win the game," Stevens said. "We haven't played in almost a month, and they were coming back and they run a unique style, so it was just a couple of things maybe you don't want to put together, but that was the hand we were dealt so we had to deal with it. I felt like we found a way to win, so you can't really complain too much about that."

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