For the second time in as many days I find myself reading a Buffs Basketball article mentioning that Coach Boyle is the first CU coach since Henry Iba in 1933-34 to win his first 3 conference games. That stat is slightly misleading. While Iba did win his first 3 games in the Rocky Mountain Conference in the 1933-34 season, he isn't the last CU coach to kick-start his conference career in such fashion.
Good Ole Ricardo Patton was in his first year as full-time CU head coach in the 1996-97 season (aka "the Billups Year") when CU ran to a 6-0 conference start. The qualifier in this case is full-time. He served as interim head coach for a stint the previous year before being having the interim tag ripped off just prior to the final Big 8 conference tournament in '96. I feel that his stint as interim and the lone conference tournament game don't count. As interim coach he wasn't technically the head coach, and that lone conference tourney game (a blowout loss to Kansas) wasn't a regular-season contest.
That's admittedly mostly horseshit, but I'm admittedly grumpy today. I also feel that RP deserves his due; he's became a quasi-pariah over his final season in Boulder, but you have to recognize the coach that gave CU 3 of it's 4 20+ win seasons, and 2 of its 8 Tournament appearances.
2 comments:
I liked RP's quasi-street ball style of play. It only worked when we got a select group of shooters together (and David Harrison), but I remember RP fondly.
I'll never forget the game where he threw Xavier Silas into the sideboards during a fight. Dude was intense.
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