Nov. 28, 2000

By Kelly Lyell
The Coloradoan

FORT COLLINS, Colo. - The temptation for the Colorado State University men's basketball team is to look past Sacramento State and toward the Phoenix Classic, a tournament Thursday and Friday in Hartford, Conn., where the Rams will face Yale in the first round.

After all, Sacramento State is a team that was picked to finish last in the nine-team Big Sky Conference.

But CSU (2-0) - a team that gained a huge dose of confidence Saturday night with a 78-64 win over Washington State - knows better.

It was this same Sacramento State team that gave the Rams all they could handle a year ago in CSU's first game since beating UCLA for the championship of the Pearl Harbor Classic. CSU held off the Hornets 69-53 thanks to a 24-point effort from senior Ceedric Goodwyn.

"I don't think we played poorly, but we were really flat - we didn't have any intensity," CSU coach Dale Layer recalled Monday. "Ceedric Goodwyn just took that game over and won it for us, but last time I checked, Ceedric Goodwyn wasn't on our roster anymore."

And that Sacramento State team wasn't as good as this one, Layer said.

"They're much better than they were last year," Layer said. "They're athletic, they shoot the ball extremely well. They're fun to watch, they're very uptempo."

Sac State (2-0) beat St. Mary's, Calif., 75-61 Wednesday behind a career-high 23-point effort from senior forward Rickie Glenn, one of four seniors in the Hornets' starting lineup and the team's leading scorer at 18.0 points a game. But four other players are averaging nine or more points a game for the Hornets under first-year coach Jerome Jenkins, an assistant last year who played collegiately at Regis University.

"We kind of struggled with them last year," CSU senior forward Garrett Patik said. "We didn't have one of our better games against them. We're not going to overlook them this year - by far."

Still, the temptation remains. Layer is trying to become the third coach in 100 years of CSU basketball to start his first season 3-0, and none have won their first five.

"Beating a Pac-10 team on the road by 15 was huge for this team," Patik said. "The team's really excited, and we know if we can get these next three that would be above nearly everybody's expectations for this team."