Utes v Stanford: Some Final Thoughts
Mar 5, 2014; Berkeley, CA, USA; Utah Utes guard/forward Princeton Onwas (3) and forward Jordan Loveridge (21) battle for a rebound ahead of California Golden Bears forward David Kravish (45) and forward Richard Solomon (35) during the second half at Haas Pavilion. The Utah Utes defeated the California Golden Bears 63-59. Mandatory Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
So I’ve thought about the Stanford game over the last 48 hours or so and I can’t help but be more frustrated. This wasn’t December in Boise or January versus Oregon, this was March. And this team has played close games all year long. The Utes won some at home, lost a bunch on the road, but at some point you have to be expected to close.
Utah got every opportunity against the Cardinal after surviving a horrible first half.
And our final play ends up being that. That is really inexcusable at this point.
I find myself more frustrated than football because once we had all the injuries, there wasn’t a ton of hope for the football team. It would have been like Delon going down, it would be hard to be disappointed in whatever this team could do.
As someone pointed out to me, the Utes were picked 9th and essentially finished there, winning a tie breaker to give us the 8th seed. And the reason Utah isn’t the 3rd seed is entirely on Utah. It was their failures, failures that didn’t really get better during the season.
And at the end of the day, I don’t know how to call that anything other than frustrating. (Yeah I realize people are going to call me a hater for saying this, but what are you going to do)
Once we see what happens in the Pac-12 tourney and however the NIT shakes out, I’ll probably look back and feel better about things. Distance from things usually does that for me.
But at the end of the day we never did close and it’s because of coaching and execution. Kinda hard to sit with.
I’ll be back this afternoon to talk Pac-12 awards. Congrats to Delon for All-Pac-12 and All-Defensive-Pac-12 Honors.