Bounce back shows Boynton’s approach
Mike Boynton spent last season, his first as a college basketball head coach, trying to navigate not only Oklahoma State’s 18-game Big 12 schedule, but also the days between.
Often, that required planning ahead for handling Saturday-Monday turnarounds, similar to the one the Cowboys face this week after beating West Virginia on the road Saturday before returning to Stillwater for an 8 p.m. Monday game against Baylor. But this year, with a team that ranks 297th nationally in experience, Boynton is taking a different approach.
“All last year, I was trying to figure out how to get a routine throughout this stuff,” Boynton said. “And I think this year, I've really just thrown all that out the window.”
So it wasn’t until after Saturday’s game that Boynton took stock of how his team felt, then practiced accordingly Sunday. He enters Monday seeking to bring the
Cowboys to a winning conference record for the first time during his tenure.
Boynton has repeatedly said that with a roster that’s half freshmen, he operates in 24-hour windows.
He and his players have echoed a message from ESPN analyst and former coach Fran Fraschilla of taking a one-game winning streak out of each contest, though the Cowboys will seek their third straight victory Monday.
Boynton’s team, he believes, needs to be as good as it can each day to reach a point where bigpicture topics become worthy of conversation. That includes the NCAA Tournament.
Although a challenging schedule has OSU as the highest ranked team with a non-winning record in the new NET ratings, college basketball’s replacement for RPI, Boynton said he hasn’t glanced at the rankings once.
“I've tried to kinda get away from the longerterm things,” Boynton said.
“My team's not prepared for that. They don't even understand any of it, so I'd be wasting a lot of time talking about those things. For me to help them, we've got to be good today and really try to just stay focused on that, and it's hard because in my mind, there is a bigger picture. There are other things, but none of them happen if we don't take care of business each and every day moving forward.
“If you take care of those things, ultimately, the numbers and the rhetoric comes around."
Boynton said he talked often about the NCAA Tournament with last year’s team, a veteran group that had plenty of tournament experience littered throughout it and narrowly missed the 68-team field, but he joked this year’s Cowboys probably don’t have much grasp of “RPI and bubbles and all that.”
Although captains Thomas Dziagwa, Cam McGriff and Lindy Waters likely have noticed the conversation shift, the juniors have helped serve as their coach’s messengers. Boynton regularly sends them texts about what areas need to be emphasized with their teammates.
So Dziagwa offered no surprises when asked about the impending turnaround.
“We haven't really thought about that,” he said. “We just take it one game at a time.”
• Baylor has a six-game winning streak against Oklahoma State, having swept the season series each of the past three years.
• The Bears will be without sophomore forward Tristan Clark, who the team announced Saturday will undergo season-ending left knee surgery. Clark (14.6 points, 6.3 rebounds) was shooting 73.7 percent, best in the nation among players attempting at least six shots a game.
• A victory Monday would make the Cowboys 3-2 in league play. It would be the first time OSU had a winning conference record through five Big 12 games since 2013-14 — Marcus Smart’s sophomore year.