2026 PHILLIPS 66 BIG 12 MEN'S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT

March 10, 2026

Tad Boyle

Bangot Dak

Barrington Hargress

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Colorado Buffaloes

Postgame Press Conference

Oklahoma State 92, Colorado 83.

TAD BOYLE: Yeah. Look, tough loss. It's never easy when it's over with, and I told these guys a couple weeks ago, when the season's over, it's over quickly. Like, it just -- it's just one day you're playing, one day you're not. Today we were playing, tomorrow we're not. So we're heading back home, and it's not a good feeling.

It's the first time -- you know, and I give our guys -- I give our program a little bit of a break. During COVID when we lost that game to Washington State that we shouldn't have, but this is the first time we've lost in the first round, which is not a good feeling. But it can help us if we let it kind of marinate, let it sink in, let it put a chip on our shoulder for next year as we move forward, because we've got a lot of young guys on this team and this program, and we got better as the year went on.

I'm really proud of these two guys to my right and to my left, Barrington and Bangot, for not only the way they played tonight, but the way they played all year and what they've given this program. Barrington in the first year he's been here, and Bangot Dak in the three years he's been here.

These are guys I'll go to war with, I'll live with. We hate losing. This was a winnable game, but we didn't get it done tonight. We didn't play well enough when we had to, and we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.

So credit goes to Oklahoma State. They played much better than us tonight.

Q. Tad, was the difference in this one just you guys' inability to guard without fouling? Obviously that was a huge difference on the scoreboard in the free throws.

TAD BOYLE: Defense and rebounding, Pat. Defense and rebounding. You know, I played for a coach who's in the Hall of Fame. It's funny. He's in his mid80s now. He texted me a couple weeks ago, and I shared it with these guys.

You know, if you defend and you rebound, you take care of the ball, you give yourself a chance to win, and we took care of the ball tonight, eight turnovers. I mean, we've been great all year long taking care of the ball, except for maybe four or five games out of 32. So this team set a school record for the fewest amount of turnovers since they've been keeping that stat. So we did a great job of that.

But defending and rebounding tonight cost us the game. Here's what I want people -- I mean, I told these guys this. We played these guys in Boulder three weeks ago. We scored 83 points. We scored 83 tonight. We won convincingly in Boulder. Tonight we lost convincingly because we didn't guard and we didn't rebound. Fifteen offensive rebounds. We're minus 10 against a team that's not a good rebounding team.

Now, we aren't either, so you have two bad rebounding teams tonight and one of them was plus 10 and one of them was minus 10, and that's why we lost the game.

I mean, the difference in the game was Christian Coleman. That kid had seven by himself, so credit to him. He played really, really well. Curry played really well off the bench for them, too.

Q. Obviously you just mentioned that you scored the same amount of points that you did in Boulder, but even though you guys started off shooting the three-point ball well, were you a little bit worried with how many jumpers there were, eventually ended up shooting 29 three-pointers?

TAD BOYLE: Yeah. We shot way too many in the first half. We got very inpatient. We took a lot of them with a lot of time left on the shot clock. We didn't show very much maturity and patience in the first half offensively.

But we still scored 40 points, so like you played bad and your shot selection's not as good as it should be and you still score 40 points. We've got a talented team.

You look at Bangot's line tonight. He's 10 for 13 from the field, two for three from three. He's got eight rebounds. He played really well. Barrington has nine assists, one turnover. He's always efficient like he normally is. Shoots over 50 percent from the field.

So it's not our offense.

But with that being said, our offense could have been a lot better in the first half, and one of the reasons they had 41 is because we settled for those jumpers and they weren't going in, long shots, long rebounds which allows them to get in transition. And yeah, they scored -- they shoot 35 free throws.

Now, a bunch of those were at the end when we were fouling, so they were probably somewhere in the high -- mid to high 20s, and we shoot 16. But that's what happens when you take 29 threes and they only take 17.

So our deal was that we wanted to win and dominate the paint, which we didn't do. And we wanted to outrebound them by plus eight, which is our goal. We didn't do that. Ballgame. I mean, it's not -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist.

Q. In any other year a guy like Isaiah Johnson probably makes the Big 12 freshman team unanimously. He's kind of fallen underneath the radar all year long. As his season comes to a close like this, what do you want people to know about the year that he had and what's possible for him moving forward?

TAD BOYLE: Well, the sky's the limit for Isaiah. There's no doubt about that. And you're exactly right about that, in a normal year he would be on the all-freshman team. The league this year had -- and he's not the only one. There's a lot of good freshmen that weren't on that team.

But Isaiah's a warrior, you know, and he's a great teammate. He's given everything he's got this year. Obviously he's in unbelievable company when you look at the guys that he passed from a scoring standpoint on Colorado's all-time list. Chauncey Billups, Richard Roby, one of our all-time leading scorers, Alec Burk, who had a career 13-year career in the NBA. And Isaiah had a better scoring year than any of those guys ever did when they were Buffs, so he did it as a freshman.

So the sky's the limit for him. And the thing I like about him is, you know, at our banquet when he and Barrington -- and I think it warrants saying this. At our banquet on Sunday, they were the co-MVPs. What makes both these kids special, in my mind, is Barrington voted for Isaiah as the MVP and Isaiah voted for Barrington as the MVP.

So to me, look at the assisted turnover ratio this kid had all year. Led the league. Look at Isaiah's ability to score the ball and the freshman year he had. That's fantastic.

I'm proud of both of them for that. But they voted for each other. They're selfless guys and they really help each other. And I think, you know, Isaiah's freshman year, a lot of thanks goes to Barrington. Barrington's elite assisted turnover ratio, part of that goes to Isaiah. Like, so these guys are really good together.

And then Bangot, he got better and better. Our whole team got better. Jalin Holland got better. Josiah Sanders. So the future of this program is as bright as it's ever been if we can keep these guys together.

And that's the challenge that we have now. We've known that all year long. Now let's see, let's see what we can do. And it's really going to be up to them. I'm going to do everything I can do. I know our school's going to do everything it can do. And it's going to come down to what they want to do.

But I love these guys. They've been a joy to coach. And I just think it warrants being said about Barrington and Isaiah and them voting for each other for the MVP because that doesn't happen in very many programs.

Q. Barrington, your defense was able to hold Anthony Roy to just six points in Boulder. Tonight he had 24. Kind of what was the difference, or what changed there?

BARRINGTON HARGRESS: Just really allowing him to get comfortable. He really was comfortable getting downhill and putting pressure on the rim. That also came from trying to get him off the line.

But yeah, he's a really good player, and he was very aggressive. He just picked a -- he picked his spots, and we have to be better in rotational defense. But yeah, he was just a really aggressive player.

Q. Coach, obviously no Sebastian Rancik tonight, and he was huge on the glass. In your first meeting with Oklahoma State, I kind of just wanted to know what the game plan was without him. And then also for Bangot, what was it like trying -- you know, in the rebounding game while missing him?

BANGOT DAK: It just hurts us when we've got to go small, I feel like, because we've got 6-5 doing it on a bigger dude. I feel like that's the only problem.

TAD BOYLE: And look, Bangot's -- or, excuse me, Sebastian is 6-10, 6-11. He does help us on the glass, there's no doubt about that.

But it's funny. We didn't play a lot tonight small, maybe five, six minutes when they had a big lineup and we had a small lineup. We did it a little bit with Josiah playing the four, and we'd practiced that this week.

But a lot of times they were small when we were small, especially down the stretch, you know? They had Coleman in the game. We had Bangot in the game. And then four guards with them. They had four guards with them. It's just they rebounded the ball better than we did as a team, and our ball screen defense was not good enough tonight.

And we tried everything. We tried switching, we tried blacking, which is double-teaming the -- we tried hard showing, we tried flat showing. We tried it all. So it's not about trying, it's about executing, and we did not execute defensively tonight good enough to beat, you know, Oklahoma State. And that was evident with their 92 points.

So disappointing because defend, rebound, take care of the ball. We didn't defend or rebound tonight. It costs us the game, and our season's over with.