We seem to be hitting our stride recently, blowing out teams even on the road in conference play. Last night's version of the Kansas blowout tour was a 29 point win over Colorado, winning 75-46. We played one of our better defensive games all season and we played plenty well on offense to win in the Coors Event Center, or more affectionately known as Allen Fieldhouse West. The wealth of scoring was spread out extremely evenly with our leading scorer scoring only 14 points (and Russell Robinson none the less). Arthur came off the bench to score 11, Kaun had 10, Chalmers and Wright chipped in 8 a piece and Brandon Rush scored 7 points. Clearly, the player of the game was Russell Robinson, perhaps putting away the poll question to the right once and for all. Here was his line:
14 points, 4 rebounds, 6 assists, 5 steals on 6-9 shooting makes for arguably RussRob's best game of the season. This just furthurs the point made on Saturday afternoon by Jimmy Dykes during the KU-MU game. With this team, much like the National Champion 2006 Gators, you never know who will emerge to lead the team to victory. On Saturday afternoon it was Julian Wright, last night Russell Robinson and who knows who will emerge Saturday afternoon when Nebrasky comes to town.
These games are important for this team's morale, we need to win and win convincingly when we are the vastly superior team and that is just what happened last night. We have another chance to do the same on Saturday before we start getting into some tough games (@ Kansas State, Iowa State, @ Oklahoma, Texas) with three of those four being games we could likely lose. Like I have said before here at RCT, I am not a big believer that a seed makes much of a difference how far you get in the NCAA Tournament. Sure, it is always nice to be a higher seed but if we are as good as we think we are, we should be fine come Tournament time for the first couple rounds. For that reason, it wouldn't mind me if we lost once or twice more before this season is over (as long as it isn't at home against Iowa State or Nebraska, it would ruin our aforementioned morale) and became a #4 or #5 seed in the Tournament. I know, I know, we were a #4 seed last year and played a very good Bradley team but I don't care, this team is more experienced and has more talent top to bottom and we can handle a team that startes with "B" this year.
Rock Chalk!