Utes appear set to claim a top-2 NCAA Tournament seed, complete with two home games at the Huntsman Center
“It’s a fine line of wanting them to enjoy this, and be excited, but also making sure that we get the work in,” Roberts said Wednesday afternoon on a Zoom call. “I think what you don’t want to do is take too much time off, and then they lose any sort of physical edge or anything like that. But you don’t want to overdo it so that we’re tired again in two weeks. So, it’s working with the people that are smarter than me and figuring out how to manage their bodies and all of that.
“I think we’re excited, we talked about it as a team yesterday that we get the opportunity to host and teams dream about that, players dream about that, coaches dream about it, and we get to do it,” Roberts said. “We need to be excited, and we are we. This is what we set out to do, win a Pac-12 championship, which we did, and host, so it’s pretty cool to check those off.
As the Utes kept winning through January and February, and the notion of hosting at the Huntsman Center became more real, Roberts consistently offered caution that nothing was done until it was done. After Utah beat Stanford to claim its share of the Pac-12 regular-season championship on Feb. 25, that went out the window.