FORT COLLINS — New Mexico players milled around the Moby Arena court for nearly 30 minutes after they had done their jobs, chatting and shaking hands with a few of the remaining Lobos fans who wanted to bask in the glow of a status quo that remained unchanged.
This was to be the day that No. 22 Colorado State took the next step in its Mountain West ascent under first-year coach Larry Eustachy. Instead, it turned into a nightmare that the Rams, afterward, admitted they could see coming at least a week earlier.
The 16th-ranked Lobos danced out of Moby with a 91-82 victory over CSU on Saturday. The Rams’ 27-game home court winning streak went down in a rainstorm of 3-point field goals from the extremely hot hand of New Mexico junior guard Kendall Williams.
Williams scored a Moby Arena-record 46 points, powered by a Mountain West-record 10 3-pointers, a simply dazzling shooting display that left CSU defenders scratching their heads and wondering why they let him get going in the first place.
“We gave him some uncontested looks, let him get hot, and guys are too good in our league to do that,” CSU senior guard Dorian Green said.
Eustachy claimed to not know the term “hot” as applied to the sport he has coached for decades.
“I never heard that a guy gets hot and gets it going; that’s terminology I’ve never used,” he said. Williams then provided that definition up close, making shot after shot, a performance out of character even for this, one of the conference’s best players, who entered shooting just 32 percent from 3-point range this season.
“He’s a very special player, and he got on a roll today,” UNM coach Steve Alford said. “And it was a 40-minute roll. He never stopped.”
As such, New Mexico (23-4, 10-2) became the first visiting team to win at Moby Arena since Nov. 19, 2011, when the Rams lost to Southern Miss, then coached by Eustachy. The Lobos ended the game on a 27-12 run to claim a victory that reaffirmed their grip on first place in the conference. It is only the second time this season that Colorado State (21-6, 8-4) lost two consecutive games.
The CSU trio of Green, Wes Eikmeier and Colton Iverson scored a combined 68 points, but the Rams got little other production outside of them, particularly in the second half. Senior forward Pierce Hornung scored only two points before fouling out. New Mexico hit 13-of-25 shots (52 percent) in the second half, while CSU saw its already anemic 41 percent first-half shooting dissolve into 34.1 percent in the second.
CSU players, however, talked about a slow fade they could see even in a win at Air Force a week earlier as the overall problem that needs to be fixed.
“Lack of thought and concentration into what we’re doing,” Green said. “Everything we do is simple; we’ve just got to do it. We’ve got to do a better job of holding ourselves accountable on a daily basis and get better. Be better.”
Christopher Dempsey: 303-954-1279, cdempsey@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dempseypost
