BIG 12 CONFERENCE MEDIA DAYS

October 20, 2005

Andy Osborn

Ricardo Patton

Richard Roby

COACH RICARDO PATTON: To my left we have Richard Roby, sophomore, from San Bernardino, California, our leading scorer a year ago and as a freshman. To Richard's left Andy Osborn from Longmont, Colorado. Andy transferred back home from Loyola Marymount and is a fifth year senior. Excited to be here. Excited to start another Big 12 season. I think that our guys are really focused to get started. We have had a nice trip pre-season to Vancouver where our guys, I thought, played extremely well and played a lot better than I had anticipated.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: Well, because we're dealing with so many guys this year, we have 19 guys on the roster and I think 6 those guys are walk ons. But bringing in a new pointguard named Dominique Coleman, gave us the opportunity to see him play and get some early reps under his belt running with the team. So that was the biggest thing. It allowed us to start practicing 10 days prior to the trip. And so that was the biggest advantage, was the 10 days of practice, early practice and getting to work our pointguard in.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: I think so. If you look back over the past few years at our team, we have always had most of the pieces and were probably missing one or two pieces. When we had David Harrison, 7-footer, who is now with the Pacers, we really didn't have a pointguard that could give us what we needed at that position. Now we have the pointguard, we don't have David Harrison. But Dominique is a guy, I think, that fills that void, he's a guy that can score. He led the nation in scoring last year at Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida. He's a guy that can pass the basketball, enjoys passing the basketball, which is a unique thing nowadays. I guess I have to say too that with any players it's similar to a marriage, you don't really know what you have until you live with them a while. And so but I think early on he's shown some signs of becoming a really good basketball player for us.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: Well, of course Andy being a senior, one of the things we have talked about with our entire group is our seniors wanting to set a standard for years to come and of course, by that we mean that they need to have senior leadership and set the tone every day in practice for particularly our young guys. Richard Roby has been a leader, both off the floor and on the floor. He leads more by example than sometimes verbally, but every day he comes and works extremely hard. So for these two young men I hope that they will not allow for any distractions to take away from what we're trying to do on the floor, or allow for any off the floor distractions to interfere with what we're trying to do on the floor. Any time you have a team that will monitor itself, then you have a chance to have a very good basketball team.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: Not really. When we go out as coaches in the July recruiting period and those kids that we're evaluating have been playing for a month or more, one of the things that you tend to see with players toward the latter part of July is the fatigue factor starting to show up and guys not playing as well late July as they did, say, in their early period. In evaluating Richard that summer, he seemed to have continued to get better and better as the period wore down. I thought he could come in and really have a nice year for us, which he did. The other piece of that is you are talking about a young man that wants to get better. I have been asked the question how does he compare with a guy like Chauncey Billups. Well, certainly his game is not at that level quite yet, but his mentality is. Chauncey was very focused, very determined to get to the next level. Very determined to improve every year, and I think Richard Roby possess that same quality.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: Richard is probably more athletic than most people give him credit for. I have seen him do some very athletic, make some very athletic plays, but that's not something that he hangs his hat on. Most of the time that when you see those guys that jump extremely high, they don't shoot the ball very well and I think it's because they spend most of their time working in their backyard on the dunk contest as opposed to working on a skill, shooting the basketball. But Richard seems to have worked on just about every phase of his game now. Certainly his defense has to improve, but he's working at it. As a coach that's all you can ask of the guys, just to continue to work on his weaknesses, and certainly he's doing that.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: This is the first time that we have taken a team, in my tenure at Colorado, on a pre-season trip. We have typically gone on holiday trips whether it be a Thanksgiving tournament, or Christmas tournament, but it's the first time for a pre-season trip and again in wanting to do that, I just wanted to get started as quickly as we possibly could with practicing. And of course the N.C.A.A. has changed their rule a little bit and allowed us to work two hours a week with our entire group this year. But by taking the trip to Vancouver, it allowed us 10 solid days of practicing which I wanted to do. Of course we're doing some new things with our players and that's one of the benefits of having a veteran team. They seem to catch on just a little bit quicker than if you had a lot of young guys.

COACH RICARDO PATTON: We played three games. Three games over a five-day period and were able to win all of those games. First team we played B.C., is a team that had beaten actually Kansas State who went on the trip a year ago and Georgia, so we felt very good about that. Again our guys played extremely well.

RICHARD ROBY: The key ingredient we have is a lot more experience than we had last year, a lot of new guys coming in and the guys that were here before didn't play a huge role the year before. And I think we have a lot more confidence coming in this year. I think that's important when you are playing in such a tough league, you have to be confident enough that you can feel you can beat every team that comes into your gym or teams you go play against.

ANDY OSBORN: Like Coach said, the practice was good but it gave the new guys to come in, like Calvin Williams and Dominique, a chance to get a feel for the rest of team like me, Rich and the other experienced guys coming back. Got us all a chance in practice to play to just feel each other out, get used to the new drills, you know, feel each other out and have a sense of what it takes to play at the level that we need to play at to be competitive in the Big 12.

ANDY OSBORN: Difference for me is every night you are playing a contender, a team that's got a really good shot of winning a lot of games. In the WTC, the conference I played in previously, there was one of two teams, like Gonzaga or Pepperdine, that was top of the league. Not every night you were playing the great team. On every night in the Big 12 playing against All-Americans, playing against really good competition. Can't lose focus, can't slip for one second in this league.