Cracks emerging in Lobos basketball bubble
Travel, struggle to practice, few games are taking toll
As great of a success story the University of New Mexico’s football team had in its self-enclosed coronavirus-free bubble, it’s hasn’t exactly been a tiptoe through the tulips for the UNM men’s basketball team.
Barely five games into the 2020-21 schedule, the Lobos (3-2 overall, 0-2 in the Mountain West) are already showing signs of wear and tear. Plastered in a pair of blowout losses at Boise State last week, they head back to their home away from home for the next four games. They’ll host Nevada on New Year’s Eve and again two days later, then face defending conference tournament champion Utah State the following week.
All four games will be in Lubbock, Texas, the temporary address for UNM hoops in what is quickly becoming an exhausting and challenging season.
Like football, both of UNM’s basketball programs — as well as both teams from New Mexico State, for that matter — have been forced out of state due to a public health order that prohibits gatherings larger than five people. Each of UNM’s teams are in the Texas Panhandle while NMSU’s teams are in Arizona.
It’s likely that New Mexico will go without a college basketball game played within its borders until November. UNM is coming to grips with that, and coping has been anything but easy.
“Hopefully being here for a little bit will give us a chance to just kind of relax and get ourselves mentally and
physically refreshed for this back half of — what seems like a back half of the season but it’s really just the start of the season,” Lobos coach Paul Weir said.
Football’s bubble was at a Hilton resort in Henderson, Nev., just a short drive from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas’ Sam Boyd Stadium. The team practiced there and hosted three games while UNLV painted the school’s logos and signs in each end zone and UNM support staff lined the field with Lobos signs and advertising.
Despite it being so far from Albuquerque, it did take on a certain look and feel of home.
That’s hardly the case for UNM’s men’s basketball team. Home games will be played at Lubbock Christian University and its 1,950-seat gymnasium. Whereas Sam Boyd was at UNM’s disposal for the season, LCU’s Rip Griffin Center is only there for scheduled workouts and games.
Weir said fans may see a few signs around the gym that remind people of home, but it won’t be as Lobos-friendly as UNLV’s football stadium was. Not even close.
“The challenge is we don’t get to go there very often,” Weir said. “I think the football team, that was their stadium so they could use it pretty much whenever and however they wanted. I don’t know if [LCU] is too excited about us putting our stuff everywhere.”
Behind the scenes it’s not terribly comfortable. Like football, the players are confined to their rooms when they’re not practicing or in team meetings. Forward Rod Brown said Tuesday that he passes the time by reading a few books he brought from home, one of which is an inspirational publication by LeBron James.
Other players have their game systems, while others keep busy with social media or watching TV. No matter what the coaches and support staff do to keep the players comfortable, it’s not home, it’s not Albuquerque and it’s not a place where a player can kick up his feet and feel completely at ease.
Weir said he felt the team’s initial foray into the Texas bubble shortly after Thanksgiving adequately prepared everyone for the Mountain West schedule. That all changed when the team had to come back to Albuquerque in early December to finish final exams.
“When we left Texas at the end of that two weeks, we were in a pretty good place,” he said.
The Lobos were practicing two, sometimes three times a day. They were getting into a rhythm and the players were rounding into shape. It was all trending in the right direction.
“I genuinely feel that if we played Boise at the end of those two weeks, the scores would have been a little bit different,” Weir said, lamenting the four or five days the team took off to focus on academics.
The team immediately went back to work, visiting Houston for a week to play three games to start the season. The luster of those initial two weeks was still there but, as Weir said, was fading fast.
“By time we got to Boise, we just weren’t as sharp as we were those couple [of] weeks prior,” he said.
Weir said the team’s flights to and from Boise, Idaho, required five hours including connections and layovers for each leg of the journey.
“I think that part is more fatiguing than just being in one location, at least being settled in a little bit,” Weir said. “I felt going to Boise, it was a really tough trip, it was a long trip and at the end of what we were doing maybe there was some fatigue in there.”
With two months of regular season games left, cracks are already starting to threaten UNM’s coronavirus bubble. From the looks of it, those problems have no easy fixes.