Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Unexpected road rout of Buffs means Cats are still pretty good, CU misses star power

The last thing you expected to see Saturday night was Sean Miller emptying Arizona’s bench with three minutes remaining, up by 25 at Colorado, taking it easy on the Buffaloes.

As it turned out, the West’s most difficult road stop Saturday wasn’t in Boulder, Colo. It was No. 6 San Diego State’s visit to the Pit in Albuquerque against 20-5 New Mexico.

Hell didn’t freeze over in Boulder, but the Buffaloes and their fans must have had the sensation of being caught in an avalanche, lying prone, dumbfounded, wondering how everything got so dark.

Given the circumstances, which included CU guard Xavier Johnson’s vow to beat the Wildcats by 20 points, and the attention given the game by ESPN’s "College GameDay" crew, it was about as well as Arizona has played at any time since its 2011 Sweet 16 victory over Duke.

Beating the Buffaloes accomplished two things: It put a further cushion between the Wildcats and UCLA in the chase for Arizona’s 12th Pac-12 championship, and it dissolved the premature notion that Arizona-Colorado was becoming one of the West’s top basketball rivalries.

Colorado will be exceptional next year; all of its starters and injured Spencer Dinwiddie will return and the preseason polls will surely rank Arizona No. 1 and the Buffaloes No. 2.

But on Saturday, Arizona probably played its best offensive game of the season, shooting 60.3 percent from the field, and for one of the few times this season, getting the ball to freshman Aaron Gordon in the right places.

When Gordon gets the ball on the interior and not on the edge or even 10 feet out, he is a different player – he is a dominator — and Arizona is a different team.

Some of it was that the Buffaloes are not a good defensive team and have neither size nor depth nor anyone who can guard Gordon inside. But, to Miller’s credit, his team appears to have evolved and sees the floor better now, after 27 games, than it has all season.

Colorado beat Arizona in the Coors Special Events Center in 2012 and 2013 because it had better players than it has now. It had senior Carlon Brown two years ago; he scored 19 in Boulder. And last year Dinwiddie and departed Andre Roberson combined for 28 points, 13 rebounds and seven assists.

Few teams in any league are deep enough to cover for the losses of those two players.

Arizona thus accomplished its Sweep on the Mountain, beating Utah and CU, for the first time, a trip that is going to be hell and then some in the immediate future.

If nothing else, it should give Arizona enough of a pad so that it’s conference finale, at Oregon on March 9, won’t affect the No. 1 seed at both the Pac-12 tournament and in the NCAA brackets.

In its last season at antiquated Packard Stadium, Arizona State is in the process of selecting its All-Packard team. Four Tucsonans are in the finals: Canyon del Oro High pitcher Ryan Schroyer, Sahuaro pitchers Kevin Dukes and Marc Barcelo and Sunnyside catcher Carlos Ramirez. Somehow, Rincon pitcher Don Hanna didn’t make the list, even though he was 15-1 for the Sun Devils. 

Ryan Schroyer is from the famed CDO baseball classes of the late ’90s that produced five big-leaguers — Shelley and Chris Duncan, Brian Anderson, Ian Kinsler and Scott Hairston — and might have been the top overall prospect of the group. He became a fifth-round draft pick of the Red Sox and reached Class AAA before retiring in 2006. Schroyer returned to ASU and completed his degree and is now a firefighter in Hendersonville, Tenn.. He recently was part of his company’s tribute — the production of a table with the names and photographs — to the 19 Yarnell firefighters who were killed near Prescott last summer. 

Retired Tucson engineer Nippy Feldhake, a cyclist of note, is working at his 13th Olympiad at the Sochi Winter Games. Feldhake is assigned to the Australian Olympic team and accompanies that nation’s Chief de Mission to all events, running interference. More than 250,000 volunteer applications were accepted for Sochi. About 28,000 were chosen. Feldhake began at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. 

Antoine Cason, the 2007 Jim Thorpe Award winner as an All-America UA cornerback, attended the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship. After one season with the Cardinals, he’s apt to move again. “I’m a free agent,” he said. “I’ll take my time and pick a team that needs me.” 

After tearing her ACL in the summer of 2012, former Canyon del Oro High softball All-American Mattie Fowler switched from shortstop to first base and helped Nebraska to the 2013 Women’s College Softball World Series. She was off to her best collegiate start this year, hitting .357 through 11 games, when she again injured her knee against, ironically, Arizona, in Friday night’s 7-0 loss to the Wildcats at the Mary Nutter Classic. It’s almost unfair. Her sister, UA senior pitcher Kenzie Fowler, was hit in the face by a batted ball last week, although she did not require hospitalization, as she did when hit by a batted ball in the UA dugout two years earlier. Kenzie’s career has been interrupted by health problems on three occasions. 

The Pac-12 Hall of Honor inducts one men’s basketball player per school, per season, and it is arriving at a crisis: Most of the schools don’t have enough star-level former players deserving of induction year after year. Arizona will induct Luke Walton next month; he fully belongs. Cal is inducting 1980s player David Butler, who was good but not Hall-of-Honor worthy. ASU has already depleted its star-level cast. 

Luke Walton’s debut as a Fox Sports 1 basketball analyst last week was a good one. He has the personality, the voice, the name and the background to make a career of it. Once he gets some experience, he’s got a chance to be one of the game’s leading analysts. Of all the ex-UA athletes/students making a living in TV-radio, none has lasted longer than ex-UA golfer Jerry Foltz, who is still a regular on the Golf Channel.

Rincon/University grad Michael Thompson will get a lot of TV time this week: He’s defending his Honda Classic title and also is hosting the Golf Channel’s “Inside the PGA Tour’’ weekly program at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday.

Bob Elliott, the second-leading scorer in UA basketball history, will sign his new book at 5 p.m., before Wednesday’s UA-Cal game at McKale Center, and again next Sunday at 4 p.m., before the UA-Stanford game. Elliott’s book,“Tucson: a Basketball Town,” will be marketed by the UA Bookstore. It is an insider’s look at the 1970s under coach Fred Snowden as McKale Center opened. 

University of San Diego’s Nick Kerr, son of UA legend Steve Kerr, had the college basketball game of his life last week, against Pacific. Kerr buried four three-pointers in eight minutes to trigger a win over UOP. How unlikely was that? Kerr had only made four treys all season, and is generally the Toreros’ 11th man. A redshirt sophomore, Kerr chose San Diego over Harvard and Penn. 

UA women’s golf coach Laura Ianello is on maternity leave and is expected to miss at least No. 13 Arizona’s next three outings, in Los Angeles, Florida and at ASU. She is replaced by assistant Derek Radley, who is married to Salpointe grad Sara Brown, a regular on the 2012 LGPA Tour. She is now back on the Symetra Tour, attempting to earn another shot at the LGPA. 

Here’s a name to keep in mind for the 2015 letter-of-intent day: Pusch Ridge Christian junior football halfback Taylor Fitzgerald has been invited to the “Junior Days’’ of Arizona and USC. Last fall, Fitzgerald rushed for 1,334 at Pusch Ridge, returned kicks for 516 yards and caught 14 passes for coach Troy Cropp’s 9-2 Lions. 

New Arizona swimming coach Rick DeMont, preparing for the Pac-12 championships in two weeks, knows what it’s like to win it all, and not just because the Wildcats won the 2008 men’s and women’s NCAA championships. As the coach of the vast Marin County (Calif.) Swim Club in the 1980s, DeMont’s record was 122-1-1.

Arizona assistant track and field coach Craig Carter, one of the nation’s most accomplished “throws” coaches, will be inducted into his alma mater’s sports Hall of Fame this week. Carter was both an All-American and a successful head coach at Utah State. At Arizona, he has coached Jill Camarena-Williams and Julie Labonte to international status, among others. Well deserved. 

Mike Tuiasosopo was Arizona’s defensive line coach under Mike Stoops for six years before sensing the inevitable firing and leaving for a similar job at Colorado. Unfortunately for Tuiasosopo and his family, the CU job was even worse; the staff was fired after two seasons. The timing was such that Tuiasosopo was unable to get a coaching job in 2013; he moved back to Tucson, enrolled his children in Oro Valley schools and spent a nervous year trying to get back in the game. Finally, last week, UCLA hired Tuiasosopo as its linebackers coach. Yes, those men at the Pac-12 level are well-paid, most of them over $200,000 per year, but it’s a transitory business, even for the best of them. 

It has been nine years since Tucson High School basketball standout Joe Kay suffered a stroke in a postgame, court-rushing incident at the Badgers’ gym. After fans stormed the court in Arizona’s Cal and ASU games, court-rushing was reviewed by ESPN. Kay, who had signed to play volleyball at Stanford but was unable to ever play again, is now in graduate school at ASU. He told the network: “ESPN and others always show it on the highlight reels — maybe if they didn’t, fans wouldn’t have that same want and need; perhaps it would simmer down. I understand why people rush the court, they want to feel like they’re part of the game. Everything is controlled when fans enter (an arena or gym), but when fans rush the court, it’s all chaos.”

The Miami Dolphins last week fired trainer Kevin O’Neill, fallout from the Richie Incognito mess. O’Neill got his start as an assistant trainer at Arizona; he was also the head athletic trainer at Catalina High School.

At the NFL Combine last week, Ka’Deem Carey told a media audience that he considered turning pro after his sophomore season, 2012.

“I felt like I was ready a year ago, but just couldn’t leave,” he said. “I stayed consistent through the year and it really proved to me that I could provide for my family.”

None of the six former UA running backs who got more than 35 NFL carries — Mike Bell, Chris Brewer, Trung Canidate, Hubie Oliver, Paul Robinson and Chuck Levy — were in the NFL when they turned 30.

Robinson was done after 737 carries. Bell was out after 395 carries.

The two most talented UA running backs, Levy and Canidate, combined for just 284 NFL carries.

The NFL is fool’s gold for all but the best 15 or 20 percent.

Let’s hope Carey is one of the few who can beat the odds and make a lifetime paycheck of his ability to carry a football.