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Roberson, CU Men Stay With It, Edge Ducks
Feb 8th
EUGENE, Ore. – Colorado basketball coach Tad Boyle had wanted his Buffaloes to play a 40-minute game, and it took them nearly that long to take their first lead on Thursday night against No. 19 Oregon.
But when CU finally got its advantage, it held. Andre Roberson’s lay-in with 29.5 seconds to play, coupled with intense defense on the Ducks over the final 41/2 minutes earned the Buffs a dramatic 48-47 win at Matt Knight Arena.
Thursday night marked CU’s first win in Eugene in 58 years, and it was accomplished in the manner Boyle expected. “Playing Oregon is like a street fight; they’re tough,” he said. “And we tried to prepare our guys for that . . . we gutted it out, we didn’t play our best. We won with our defense and our rebounding at the end.”
CU’s offense was hard to find; the Buffs’ winning total was their fewest in the modern shot clock era. The last time CU won while scoring fewer than 50 points was on Feb. 2, 1967 in a 49-42 victory over Oklahoma State.
On Thursday night, the Buffs shot only 36.5 percent from the field, but they held the Ducks to 36.2 percent. CU’s defense was particularly unforgiving in the final 4:26, holding the Ducks scoreless after they had taken a 47-40 lead.
“You shoot 36 percent on the road . . . you find a way,” Boyle said. “Hopefully our guys can learn from that and take some confidence from it. We’re going to start playing better offensively and making some shots and become more efficient. We’re in a little bit of a funk offensively right now, but we’ll break out of it.”
CU had only one player in double figures – Roberson, who collected his 35th career double-double with 10 points and 13 rebounds. It his Pac-12 Conference leading 10th double-double this season.
Roberson scored four of his points and grabbed three of his rebounds in the final 2:15. “There was a look in his eye, a determination, an energy that I hadn’t seen before,” Boyle said. “It was reminiscent of what I saw out of Carlon (Brown) and Nate (Tomlinson) and Austin (Dufault) towards the end of last year. Those seniors said we’re going to get this done and find a way. Andre was the same way.”
Said Roberson: “I didn’t want us to lose, and it starts with me . . . I just took it on myself to go out and play defense and continue to fight. We were still right there; we just weren’t getting over that hump to get the lead. I tip my hat to each and every one of our guys.”
The first tip of his hat might go to Spencer Dinwiddie, whose late defense was as critical as Roberson’s, according to Boyle. Dinwiddie pressured E.J. Singler on Oregon’s final full possession into a difficult shot, appearing to get a piece of the ball.
Said Boyle: “Spencer was terrific . . . those two guys (Dinwiddie, Roberson) were the difference in the game for us defensively. He played great defense (on Singler). Whether he got a touch, I don’t know. We had two fouls to give. We talked about maybe giving one on the drive or on the dribble. We didn’t want to foul a shooter, obviously, (Oregon) being down one. We showed very good judgment there.”
Dinwiddie, who finished with eight points and four assists, gave more credit to Roberson’s ‘D’ than his own. He also said ‘Dre’ “pulled down every single big board we needed. One time he even let out a primal scream after he got one of those boards. He’s big for us because he’s our best rebounder and that means so much for us. As you saw, with his nose for the ball, he got the last shot blocked, got it right back, scored it and it didn’t even faze him. He won the game for us.”
After falling short last weekend in a disheartening loss at Utah, CU (15-7, 5-5) needed a healing night on the court. So did Oregon (18-5, 7-3) after dropping a pair of games in the Bay Area. But it was the Buffs who finished strong this time, closing out the game with an 8-0 run and improving to 2-2 against ranked opponents this season.
CU also has beaten then-No. 16 Baylor but lost at then-No. 3 Arizona and then-No. 9 Kansas. The Buffs’ last road win against a ranked opponent was on Jan. 12, 2011, when they defeated No. 21 Kansas State 74-66.
Oregon freshman point guard Dominic Artis missed his fourth straight game with a foot injury. But until the final minutes, the Ducks weren’t as turnover prone Thursday as they had been in their previous three games, when they totaled 65. By halftime, forging a five-point lead, Oregon had committed just four turnovers to CU’s eight.
But the Buffs committed only four second-half turnovers and never succumbed to the Ducks’ pressure. Oregon also finished with a dozen turnovers.
The Buffs never led in the opening half and trailed by as many as eight points (15-7) with 11 minutes before the break. During the stretch when they fell behind by that margin, they strayed from what Boyle wanted from them – specifically, to attack the rim in transition and run after getting stops. Problem was, the stops weren’t plentiful enough to allow CU to speed up its transition game. The Buffs stayed out of sorts offensively for nearly 6 minutes.
“I’m really proud of our players, to win when you don’t play your best,” said Boyle. “You have to do it at some point of the year, you just do, and multiple times sometimes because it’s not always going to be pretty.”
After the Ducks took their eight-point first-half lead, the Buffs got strong minutes off the bench from Jeremy Adams, who hit a pair of free throws and three-pointer during a 10-2 run that pulled CU into a 17-17 tie.
But Oregon, responding with a 9-2 surge, went back on top by seven points (26-19) and CU needed a turnaround jumper by Josh Scott at the halftime buzzer to trail 28-23 at intermission.
Oregon got 12 first-half points from Singler and eight off the bench from Emory. Singler and Emery finished with 14 each for the Ducks, who had won 20 consecutive home games stretching back to the 2011-12 season (14-0 this season).
The Buffs opened the second half with a traditional three-point play from Dinwiddie – his first points of the game. That cut the Ducks’ lead to 28-26 with 17:57 to play, and another Dinwiddie layup brought CU to within 30-28 less than a minute later.
An Xavier Johnson trey – his second of the game – pulled the Buffs to within 32-31 with just over 15 minutes remaining. But the Ducks outscored their visitors 7-2 over the next 4 minutes and increased their advantage to 39-33 with 11:02 left.
CU pulled to within 47-43 at the 3:01 mark on one of two free throws by Askia Booker, to 47-44 on one of two foul shots by Scott, then to 47-46 on a putback by Roberson with 2:07 to play.
After each team squandered a possession apiece, the Buffs got the ball after an offensive foul by Singler with 50.1 seconds remaining. Boyle called timeout with 46.2 seconds showing, and Roberson’s lay-in gave CU its one-point lead at the 29.5 mark.
After rebounding Singler’s miss in the final 2 seconds, Roberson was fouled and went to the foul line to shoot one-and-one. He missed the first attempt and Oregon’s Arsalan Kazemi rebounded. But with less than a second to play, the Ducks were done.
“Our guys got stops when they had to,” Boyle said. “As painful and as disappointing as that Utah loss was for us, it might have done this team some good. We learned a couple of things: We know we have to play from the get-go, which I think we did . . . we competed. And secondly, knowing we can come back at the end. We came back and we won.”
The Buffs play next at Oregon State on Sunday (7 p.m. MST, Pac-12 Network).
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Can plants be altruistic? You bet, says new CU-Boulder-led study
Feb 4th
We’ve all heard examples of animal altruism: Dogs caring for orphaned kittens, chimps sharing food or dolphins nudging injured mates to the surface. Now, a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests some plants are altruistic too.
The researchers looked at corn, in which each fertilized seed contained two “siblings” — an embryo and a corresponding bit of tissue known as endosperm that feeds the embryo as the seed grows, said CU-Boulder Professor Pamela Diggle. They compared the growth and behavior of the embryos and endosperm in seeds sharing the same mother and father with the growth and behavior of embryos and endosperm that had genetically different parents.
“The results indicated embryos with the same mother and father as the endosperm in their seed weighed significantly more than embryos with the same mother but a different father,” said Diggle, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. “We found that endosperm that does not share the same father as the embryo does not hand over as much food — it appears to be acting less cooperatively.”
A paper on the subject was published during the week of Jan. 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors on the study included Chi-Chih Wu, a CU-Boulder doctoral student in the ecology and evolutionary biology department and Professor William “Ned” Friedman, a professor at Harvard University who helped conduct research on the project while a faculty member at CU-Boulder.
Diggle said it is fairly clear from previous research that plants can preferentially withhold nutrients from inferior offspring when resources are limited. “Our study is the first to specifically test the idea of cooperation among siblings in plants.”
“One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives,” said Friedman. “Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary. When the endosperm gives all of its food to the embryo and then dies, it doesn’t get more altruistic than that.”
In corn reproduction, male flowers at the top of the plants distribute pollen grains two at a time through individual tubes to tiny cobs on the stalks covered by strands known as silks in a process known as double fertilization. When the two pollen grains come in contact with an individual silk, they produce a seed containing an embryo and endosperm. Each embryo results in just a single kernel of corn, said Diggle.
The team took advantage of an extremely rare phenomenon in plants called “hetero-fertilization,” in which two different fathers sire individual corn kernels, said Diggle, currently a visiting professor at Harvard. The manipulation of corn plant genes that has been going on for millennia — resulting in the production of multicolored “Indian corn” cobs of various colors like red, purple, blue and yellow — helped the researchers in assessing the parentage of the kernels, she said.
Wu, who cultivated the corn and harvested more than 100 ears over a three-year period, removed, mapped and weighed every individual kernel out of each cob from the harvests. While the majority of kernels had an endosperm and embryo of the same color — an indication they shared the same mother and father — some had different colors for each, such as a purple outer kernel with yellow embryo.
Wu was searching for such rare kernels — far less than one in 100 — that had two different fathers as a way to assess cooperation between the embryo and endosperm. “It was very challenging and time-consuming research,” said Friedman. “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, or in this case, a kernel in a silo.”
Endosperm — in the form of corn, rice, wheat and other crops — is critical to humans, providing about 70 percent of calories we consume annually worldwide. “The tissue in the seeds of flowering plants is what feeds the world,” said Friedman, who also directs the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard. “If flowering plants weren’t here, humans wouldn’t be here.”
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CU Women’s Comeback Falls Short Against No. 6 Cardinal
Jan 28th
STANFORD, Calif. – The Colorado women’s basketball team encountered another in-game lapse on Sunday against Stanford, rallied from it, but couldn’t finish its comeback and fell 69-56 to the No. 6 Cardinal at Maples Pavilion.
The No. 20 Buffaloes held their own for most of the first half, staying within single digits of the Cardinal by halftime (35-26). That gap could’ve been smaller, however, had the Buffs not given up 10 first-half turnovers and allowed the Cardinal to go on a 9-3 run to cap the first half.
Colorado didn’t regain its momentum until midway through the second half, and with 14:25 remaining, Stanford had already built a 21-point lead from which CU could not recover. That slow second-half start, CU head coach Linda Lappe said, was reminiscent of another scoring drought the Buffs had the last time they played Stanford – a 57-40 loss on Jan 4.
“In both games that we’ve played these guys, we’ve had a stretch where we have not played very well, and we’ve just given them way too many opportunities,” Lappe said. “We weren’t making them work to get that 21-point lead, and that’s probably the most disappointing thing, in both games. Last time it was at the beginning of the game, this time it was right before half into the second half.”
With the loss, the Buffaloes drop to 15-4 overall and 4-4 in Pac-12 Conference play, while Stanford improves to 18-2 and 7-1 in the Pac-12.
The two teams were ranked No. 1 and 2 in the conference in scoring defense entering the game, with the Buffs holding opponents to 52.7 points per game and the Cardinal 52.9. On Sunday, though, Stanford’s defense prevailed, forcing 18 Colorado turnovers.
Despite its ineffective opening to the second half, CU had nearly 15 minutes to play and wasn’t about to give up. The Buffs brought themselves back into contention with a 12-0 run, trimming the score to 51-42 with 10:45 remaining. The Cardinal’s lead eventually shrunk to just seven (53-46) as Brittany Wilson hit a three with eight minutes on the clock.
But every time Colorado brought the energy, Stanford responded. With 6:10 remaining, Stanford made what turned out to be a five-point play: forward Joslyn Tinkle hit a three-pointer, and missed her “and-1” shot, which forward Chiney Ogwumike rebounded for a layup.
It was the spark the Cardinal needed to bring the game home.
“We didn’t close out with our high hands, we run into the shooter and then we don’t box out on the free throw, and that was a huge deal at that point in the game,” Lappe said. “It gave them a lot of momentum.”
Though the Buffs kept fighting, they would never get closer than 10 points.
Lappe said that while Stanford brought a high level of play to the game, many of the Buffs’ mistakes were of their own creation.
“We didn’t do nearly enough that it was going to take to win tonight,” Lappe said, “and I felt like we controlled a lot of that.”
But junior guard Ashley Wilson, who scored five of her seven points during CU’s second-half comeback attempt, said her team had to feel that a win was still possible until the final buzzer.
“It’s just never giving up. No matter what position we’re in, we have to fight, fight ’till when the horn goes off,” Wilson said. “We’ve just got to be ready to bounce back. That’s all we can do every single time is bounce back and not let it defeat us.”
Sophomore forward Jamee Swan led Colorado in scoring with 14 points off the bench, while senior guard Chucky Jeffery added 13. Jeffery and redshirt freshman forward Arielle Roberson grabbed a team-high seven boards each, helping CU to out-rebound the Cardinal 39-33.
Stanford’s Ogwumike led all scorers with 20, adding 12 rebounds to earn her 15th double-double of the season. Three other Stanford players – Tinkle, guard Toni Kokenis and guard Amber Orrange – also scored in double figures, as the Cardinal hit 49.1 percent from the field compared to CU’s 36.1 percent.
Colorado has now played both of the Pac-12’s top-10 teams, Cal and Stanford, twice each, with those four games being the Buffs’ only conference losses.
Ashley Wilson said there were definite benefits to taking on such tough competition early in the season.
“We know we can play with the top teams in the country, we’ve proven that multiple times,” Wilson said. “So now we just have to take this confidence, take the positives out of this game and just let it keep rolling into the next few games.”
CU plays the third of four straight away games on Friday night against UCLA. The matchup is set for 9 p.m. MST and will air on the Pac-12 Network.
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