Lobos f lourishing away from Pit
Three of four league wins have come on road
The noise, it seems, is much easier to block out when it’s not there.
For the UNM Lobos, winners of two consecutive road games and three out of the four road trips they took in 17-day period to start the month, the roaring boos, criticism and disappointment heard from 11,000 fans in the Pit and around Albuquerque last week amid consecutive home losses was hard to take.
The much quieter boos, jeers and heckles of much opposing fan bases in wins at Colorado State on Saturday (an announced crowd of 3,418) and at Boise State on Tuesday (3,752), not only didn’t intimidate the Lobos, it seemed to invigorate them.
In the CSU win, the Lobos led by as many as 21 points in a one-sided 84-71 win over a team that entered that game with the second best record in the league. In the BSU win, the Lobos led wire-to-wire and were up by as many as 20 in an 81-70 win against a team that entered that game tied for first in the league.
In both, the Lobos seemed to look as focused and together as at any point
this season. Throw in the Jan. 1 win at preseason title favorite San Diego State and three of UNM’s four Mountain West Conference wins have been on the road.
“We have to continue to worry only about the noise in our locker room,” said Craig Neal after Tuesday’s win. “And not worry about any noise outside the locker room.”
Neal has referred to “the noise” a lot this season — a catchall phrase for media, fan and social media criticism of the program that has been a growing distraction for the Lobos (11-8, 4-3 MWC) in recent years. He has made it a point not to say that noise is about playing at home and the Pit itself isn’t the distraction. In fact, he has gone out of his way to praise Pit fans after recent losses.
Asked last week after the 71-66 loss to UNLV when fans booed he and his team off the court as time expired, Neal still wouldn’t take the bait when asked if his team would simply be better off hitting the road.
“I don’t think we want to get away,” Neal said after the loss. “It’s where we live, where we play and where we go to school . ... They have to be a little more focused on the task at hand and not let it effect them.”
But the pressures of the Pit aren’t new and aren’t confined to this roster.
In January 2014, former Lobo fouryear starter Hugh Greenwood said, “I think guys on the road, we kind of have a relaxed feeling. There’s so much pressure playing here in the Pit, honestly.”
And the results, at least recently, don’t lie. The Lobos seem to be better on the road as of late than in the familiar and friendly surroundings of the Pit. It seems the team knows how to take the heat of opposing fans better than when it’s coming from their own.
“I love playing on the road, just in general,” Elijah Brown told the Journal on Saturday. “They (opposing fans) love me. They love us. They’ve always got something to say to us — the student sections or behind the bench, the players on the court. Obviously we’ve just got to play basketball at the end of the day, but when it comes down to it, we’re not going to take anything. Especially on the road, we’ve got to have our defenses up — take the battle to them instead of them taking it to us.”
The pressure isn’t going anywhere as UNM hosts Wyoming on Saturday and Utah State on Tuesday. But what might be different now than it was a week ago after the embarrassment of the UNLV loss is a different mental approach.
Regardless of how much of the “noise” they created themselves this season — inconsistent play, tweets that seemed to suggest player/coach drama, a 31-point loss in a regional rivalry, blowing a 25-point second half lead to Nevada, losing to an outmatched UNLV team, being involved in a game filled with trash talk and near fights that spilled over to a parking lot after the game — the Lobos now seem to have found a way to use all the outside criticism as an accelerant rather than a depressant.
Neal says Tim Williams and Brown have been a big reason why.
“Really proud of these guys because they’ve been through a lot the last two weeks,” Neal said. “I think this whole deal has made us stronger, together. I’ve got to give Tim Williams and Elijah (Brown) a lot of credit for the leadership. They’ve really been talking with the guys and everyone has been in tune and better defensively.”
As for this new “chip on the shoulder” mentality that seemed to be a trademark of Lobo teams up until about 2014, Neal acknowledges that does seem to be forming in the locker room this season.
“As Elijah says, it’s Lobos against the world,” Neal said, tongue in cheek. “I just think they get it now. I think they know what we can do. I think they’re understanding what I’m telling them. I think they’re understanding where I think they can go and I think they understand how good they can be. Now, we have a long way to go. We do. We’ve got a long way to go as a team, but I like how we’re playing. I think we’re playing really, really good basketball.”