Life was simpler when Tad Boyle began his collegiate coaching career in 1994, trading his leading role as the head coach at Longmont High for a low-level assistant spot at Oregon.
During Boyle’s journey from Longmont to Eugene, he wasn’t bothered by incessant pings on a cell phone. A buck and a quarter could buy a gallon of gas with a few drops to spare. And constructing a college basketball roster followed a tried-and-true formula — recruit the best players available, then develop them over the next four or five years.
In that light, little has changed for Boyle as he sets out on his 16th season leading the Colorado men’s basketball program. Coming off the worst record — 14-21 overall and 3-17, dead last, in the Big 12 — of what otherwise has been a successful run in Boulder, the Buffs will be relying on a youth movement to climb out of the Big 12 basement when preseason practice begins on Wednesday.
One of the key tenets of Boyle’s approach, developing players patiently over multiple seasons, may not quite qualify as dinosaur status in a new era of annual roster overhaul and revenue-sharing payouts. But it certainly counts as an endangered species, yet one the Buffs are counting on for a revival as they open the 2025-26 campaign with eight of the 14 scholarship players — seven true freshmen, plus redshirt freshman Andrew Crawford — having never played a minute of college basketball.
“We’re definitely in a different point in time,” Boyle said. “I’ve mentioned this to several people in that I’ve been coaching Division I basketball for 31 years. In terms of recruiting, in terms of building a team/program, you can throw the first 28 years out the window. That experience does me no good. Because it’s a whole new ball game in terms of how you’re recruiting kids, how you’re retaining kids, and the decisions that you’re making.”
Boyle admitted some of last year’s personnel decisions didn’t pan out, from rolling along with four-year guards Julian Hammond III and Javon Ruffin to hoping to unearth another level out of graduate transfer Andrej Jakimovski, previously a four-year role player at Washington State.
Still, while the Buffs posted just the eighth 20-loss season in program history, there were plenty of near-misses along the way. After an 0-13 start to league play, CU went 5-5 through the Big 12 tournament, where the Buffs won a pair of games. For the four returnees who all played key roles in that late flicker of life — Sebastian Rancik, Bangot Dak, Elijah Malone and Felix Kossaras — it at least provided a sign the ’25-26 core might be able to compete.
“Sometimes you make decisions and they work. Sometimes you make decisions and they don’t work,” Boyle said. “As I look at last year’s season, certainly you look at the record and you go from 26 wins to 14 wins. What went wrong? I didn’t think we were a 14-win team. You look at the early Big 12 games. You win or you lose, that’s an absolute. There’s certain years the record looks good and you came out on top in those close games. Last year was a year we came up on the bottom of them.
“Me and our staff certainly didn’t forget how to coach. We probably made some mistakes in building the roster for last year’s team. There’s reasons for that. Some of those reasons I have control over. Some I don’t. For me, I have to look in the mirror and say what could’ve you done differently? What should’ve you done differently? And probably more important, what are you going to do differently next year?”
While Dak, Malone and Rancik, still just a sophomore, all will be counted upon to provide leadership and increased production, any near future in which the Buffs are a factor in the Big 12 race will require Boyle and his staff to double down on the developmental approach, particularly with this year’s seven-player freshman class.
In years past, CU’s coaching staff and fans alike might have been willing to endure a few lumps with a young core high on promise. The 17-15 team of 2017-18, with a freshman class featuring McKinley Wright IV, Tyler Bey, D’Shawn Schwartz and a redshirting Evan Battey, is a prime example.
In today’s game, though, there is little guarantee players will stay in a program long enough to reap collective dividends, as those 2017 freshmen did. Boyle admits retaining all seven freshmen might be a naïve thought, but the Buffs plan to retain as many as possible. After over-signing with recent recruiting classes, Boyle said he has no plans to over-sign this year.
Granted, it’s an easy year to take that approach, as Malone is the only player whose eligibility is set to expire. But Boyle, whose club received a verbal commitment from Phoenix-area wing Rider Portela earlier this week, said the approach also is meant to be a show of faith for a freshman class critical to returning the program to the standards set during the bulk of his tenure.
“We felt like we addressed some of the issues that we needed to have in recruiting,” said Mike Rohn, CU’s associate head coach and recruiting coordinator. “That’s kind of where it all starts. This spring, we retained the most important pieces to the puzzle, we felt like. I think that’s the biggest thing year-to-year anymore. Every year now is potentially much different than what you forecast it to be.
“We’ve always been that program that keeps churning out development and year after year, guys get better. I don’t know if that model is quite as sustainable from a complete roster. You hope it is as much as possible. Because where we’re at and what our philosophies are, it’s still about the development piece and your team getting better from one year to the next.”