Tad Boyle has been in Boulder for 17 seasons. He has won 329 games, taken Colorado to six NCAA Tournaments, and coached lottery picks and NBA champions. And he has never had a job quite like this one: rebuilding the Buffaloes in the Big 12 — the deepest, most unforgiving league in college basketball — with a roster that turns over like a river and a fan base that remembers when March was a habit, not a hope.
Boyle’s résumé is the program’s modern history. Hired in 2010, he won the Pac-12 tournament in Colorado’s first season in the league in 2012, then took the Buffs to five NCAA Tournaments in six years. The lineage of players he developed is the best in school history: Alec Burks, Spencer Dinwiddie, Derrick White — a 2024 NBA champion with the Boston Celtics who still bleeds black and gold — McKinley Wright IV, Jabari Walker, Tristan da Silva and Cody Williams, the No. 10 pick in the 2024 NBA Draft. Boyle’s teams defended, rebounded and shared the ball, and for a decade Colorado was the program in the Pac-12 nobody wanted to draw in March. His 329-220 record in Boulder made him the winningest coach in school history.
Then came the Big 12 return, and the bottom fell out. Colorado left the Pac-12 after the 2023-24 season — a 26-win team that went from the First Four to the second round of the NCAA Tournament — and walked straight into a buzzsaw. The 2024-25 Buffs went 14-21 and 3-17 in league play, opening 0-13 in Big 12 games and finishing last. There are no nights off in this conference, and Colorado learned that the hard way: Houston, Kansas, Arizona, Texas Tech, BYU, Iowa State, Baylor — every week another top-25 team, every road trip a hornet’s nest.
The 2025-26 season was the climb back. The Buffs went 17-16 overall and 7-11 in the Big 12, won the Acrisure Holiday Classic and reached the quarterfinal of the College Basketball Crown. Progress, not arrival — 10-28 in Big 12 play across the two seasons back — but real progress, built on a fascinating roster. Barrington Hargress, the transfer from UC Riverside, led the Big 12 in assist-to-turnover ratio and finished as the team’s second-leading scorer. Elijah Malone, the graduate center, led the team shooting 59.2 percent from the field. Bangot Dak, the 6-foot-11 junior wing, finished fourth in the conference with 35 blocks. Sebastian Rancik, the young Slovakian scorer, showed the flashes — including a 19-point night at Kansas as a freshman — that made him one of the league’s most intriguing sophomores. And the freshman class was the program’s best in years: Isaiah Johnson set Colorado’s all-time single-season freshman scoring record, while Josiah Sanders, Jalin Holland — who emerged as the team’s best on-ball defender by season’s end — and Ian Inman gave Boyle a young core with real toughness.
“What kind of history do we want to create with this year’s team?” Boyle asked at media day, and the 2026-27 season is his answer to his own question — delivered with a remade roster, because the portal giveth and the portal taketh away. Johnson left for Texas. Dak went to Vanderbilt. Rancik to Florida State. Associate head coach Mike Rohn departed for Kansas City. But Hargress stayed for his final collegiate season, the steady hand every rebuild needs, and Boyle kept three of his four prized freshmen: Sanders, Holland and Inman. “When I think of those three together, I think of toughness,” Boyle said. “Their toughness, energy and work ethic — when you have those attributes to go along with talent, which they all have, you get a chance to have three really good sophomores.” The portal brought three mid-major forwards — David Gomez, Noah Feddersen and Justin Neely — betting that production translates up a level. Summer workouts began June 1 with a mostly new-look squad and the same old standards.
The stakes are plain. Boyle has never taken the Buffaloes to the NCAA Tournament as a member of the Big 12 — his 2010-11 team went to the NIT, and all six of his tournament trips came in the Pac-12 years. The conference he returned to is widely considered the best in the sport, and the climb from 7-11 to the right side of the bubble is the steepest in college basketball. The CU Events Center, with the student section on its feet, remains one of the West’s great home courts when the Buffs give it something to roar about — and Boyle’s best teams always have.
Seventeen years in, the question Boyle posed at media day still hangs over everything: what kind of history do we want to create? The banners say Colorado knows how. The Big 12 will decide if they still can. But nobody who has watched Tad Boyle build — twice now, in two different leagues — is betting against him building it a third time.
