Wildcats, Buffaloes ready to give it another shot after low-key Christmas

After their Dec. 2 matchup was postponed, Arizona and Colorado agreed instead to cram it between Christmas and two-game Pac-12 road trips over New Year’s weekend.

Considering the times, maybe that was a fitting solution.

Nobody was going home for a holiday break, anyway. Not with COVID-19 risk factors and mandatory isolation upon return.

“Something Sean and I talked about was the 28th made a lot of sense because we both wanted to keep our players on campus,” Colorado coach Tad Boyle said, referring to UA coach Sean Miller.

“It’s not that we don’t want them to be with their families. But this year more than anything, keeping them around each other is really, really important. It’s trying to limit the outside contacts that they have and our players have done a really, really good job of that.”

So before traveling to Tucson on Sunday afternoon, Boyle said the Buffaloes stuck together in Boulder over their brief break ... and had a little fun with a sport of a different kind.

“We did some kind of team building stuff, played some touch football in the indoor practice facility on Christmas afternoon,” Boyle said, “just because I didn’t want to be in their rooms all day by themselves.. … You just want to do something different. It’s Christmas Day. They’re used to being around their families and in a normal year, we would have sent them home.”

Of course, in the pandemic era of sports, even playing touch football might bring yet another worry about future contact tracing, the kind that has led to both cancellations and limited player availability at times through Colorado’s 6-1 start.

But the Buffs know how to be careful by now.

“When you’re being tested every day, the one kind of people you feel really really comfortable around is your group,” Boyle said.

“Our guys come in the building and they’ve got their masks on. They go get tested in the training room and they’ve got their masks on. And when the test comes back negative, they get to take their masks off for three or four hours and play basketball or play touch football or play whatever.

“We certainly didn’t have anybody else in there playing with us. Coaches weren’t playing. It was just players only.”

Because of their protocols, the Buffaloes went ahead with a catered meal afterward, too.

That was the least Boyle figured they could do.

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“Again, I was not going to have our players not have a Christmas dinner,” Boyle said. “I was not gonna have our players sitting in their rooms by themselves on Christmas Day. It’s just, to me, I can’t. I couldn’t live with myself.”

While the Wildcats have not been available for comment since their three-day break, Miller indicated beforehand that they were going to play it low-key.

“We’re obviously gonna really look after them as best we can,” Miller said. “But in Pima County …. there’s only so much any of us can do right now. Small gatherings, trying to follow the COVID protocols. We encourage our players to do that.”

By now, both coaches have plenty of reason to tread carefully. While UA has had seven schedule games postponed or canceled, the Buffaloes were forced to pull out of the Dec. 2 game at McKale and a Dec. 5 home game with Washington State because of their own COVID-19 issues.

They also played two games without players who were sidelined by contact tracing — and had Colorado State pull out of a Dec. 8 game because of its COVID issues.

Yet the Buffs have still managed to get in seven games, the same that Arizona has.

“A lot of it has to do with how many guys you have test positive,” Boyle said. “If you have one guy here and then a week or two later you have another guy (you’re OK) … and that’s what’s happened to us. It has not run through our team.

“There are other teams where it has. I’ve talked to other coaches where five six or seven guys have come down with it within a two or three day period, and those are the situations where you’re gonna shut down and come back when you can come back. We’ve been fortunate to some degree.”

They’ve also been able to keep going despite an aggressive and travel-heavy schedule that many high-major teams are avoiding because of the extra cost and risk with travel in the pandemic.

In fact, the Buffs are just one of five power conference teams to have played five or more games away from home already, having even dropped a potential home game with the Colorado School of Mines in order to play at Tennessee.

Stanford, which was effectively locked out of its home county because of health orders, has played six games away from home, while CU, North Carolina, Boston College and Indiana have played five already.

Now the Buffs have to play three more: Monday’s game at Arizona and then games at USC on Thursday and UCLA on Saturday. Later this season, they’ll have to figure out a way to plug Washington State back in to make up for that Dec. 5 postponement, too.

“This is big, there’s no doubt,” Boyle said of CU’s week ahead. “We’ve started on the road before in the years past, but, you can’t win two in a row unless you win one in a row so the option in Arizona is obviously at the forefront of our mind.

“This league race with our with our two early December conference games getting postponed (means) we’ve got them a little bit more kind of jammed in there. So we’ve got to be ready. We’ve got to be ready for Arizona and I think our guys will be.”