BOULDER — Tad Boyle had a clear message for Rick Crawford.

“You cannot miss that call,” Boyle appeared to tell the veteran official.

It’s the call everybody who was inside the CU Events Center on Tuesday night will remember for quite some time.

With the Buffaloes trailing by just one point and under six minutes remaining, a 20-second stretch completely flipped the game.

CU forced a Kansas turnover and had a chance to retake the lead for the first time since early in the game on a fastbreak, but the Jayhawks came up with a block and quickly turned into two points on the other end thanks to a layup by Melvin Council Jr.

Seconds later, though, Council, while still out of bounds, intercepted the Buffs’ in-bounds pass and scored another quick bucket to give KU a 64-59 lead in a wild sequence that Boyle believes was the difference in CU’s (12-7, 2-4 Big 12) 75-69 loss to the 19th-ranked Jayhawks (13-5, 4-2).

“To me, that was the deciding factor in the game,” Boyle said. “That’s a big turning point and a momentum shift and we never quite recovered from that. We just couldn’t get over the hump. Sometimes the breaks go your way and sometimes they don’t. This year they haven’t, so far. Not in these close games.”

Combined with a controversial bucket for Texas Tech that appeared to come after the shot clock expired in the Buffs’ two-point loss to the Red Raiders earlier this month and the breaks just continued to go against Boyle’s team.

“Frustration is being nice,” Boyle said.

After Tad Boyle’s team started conference play 2-0 and appeared to be well on the way to racing past last year’s dismal 3-17 record, the Buffaloes have now lost four straight.

The CU Events Center was rocking on Tuesday, partly with Jayhawks fans, but mostly with CU faithful as Buff Nation was hoping for the program’s first win since Dec. 2013 over the team from Lawrence. 

That was back in the Buffs’ Pac-12 days. They haven’t beaten KU as Big 12 foes since 2003.

Now that the two are conference foes once again, it’s been much of the same treatment from big brother to little brother as the Jayhawks have won the first three meetings since CU rejoined the Big 12 in 2024.

This one felt awfully familiar to KU’s last trip to Boulder last winter. The scrappy Buffs hung in it and had chances to seize momentum, especially in the second half when both teams were struggling offensively. But the run Boyle’s team was searching for never really arrived. 

The Buffs didn’t help themselves, even after that controversial stretch. They couldn’t buy a bucket late and after star freshman Darryn Peterson banked in a 3-pointer to give the Jayhawks a 69-60 lead with a little over two minutes left, that was it.

Boyle’s team finished just 25-for-70 (35.7%) from the field in the game and could never get any consistent offense going in the second half.

Freshman Isaiah Johnson had a game-high 19 points and he combined with backcourt partner Barrington Hargress to score 36 of the team’s points, but that’s not the recipe for success CU is looking for offensively.

“A lot of it was not making shots. We got some good looks. That’s all I can ask as a coach is that we’re getting good shots,” Boyle said. “We’ve got a couple of guys that are struggling individually. For this team to be as good as we can be, we can’t really rely on one or two guys. Right now, Isaiah and Barrington are really carrying the load. I don’t want to be over simplistic, but when you have open shots against teams like KU or West Virginia or Cincinnati, name the team, you better make ‘em, or at least make some of them.”

It’s been that kind of a stretch for CU.

After wins over Arizona State and Utah to begin the new year, the Buffs have now dropped four in a row, with a pair of home losses to ranked opponents bookending a disappointing 0-2 road trip out east.

Whenever the next win does come, it will still tie last year’s mark in the Big 12, but they would like it to come sooner rather than later.

“This is what we signed up for,” Hargress said. “We knew that these games were gonna be tough. We knew that this was the best league in the country. We understand that you can’t fold from tough games. I mean, just like that we could be 5-0. The same way that we just dropped (four straight), we gotta just turn around and get right back to it.”

GAME RECAP

No. 19 Kansas 75, Colorado 69

What happened: The Buffaloes (12-7, 2-4 Big 12) fell to rival Jayhawks (13-5, 4-2) for a fourth-straight time, three in a row since the program rejoined the Big 12, as KU pulled away late to win in front of about a thousand fans chanting “Rock Chalk” as the final seconds ticked off the clock.

Star of the night: Veteran point guard Melvin Council Jr. was key down the stretch for the Jayhawks — even if one of his buckets shouldn’t have counted — as he finished with a team-high 18 points on 7-for-13 shooting from the field and 2-for-4 from 3-point range to go with seven rebounds and three assists. 

Quotable: “Bill and I exchanged voicemails. He’s a great guy. A guy I consider a friend. Bill and I came into the Big 8 in 1981 together. He was a guard at Oklahoma State, I was a guard at Kansas. We finished our careers together, guarding each other all four years. We go way back. He’s a hell of a coach, obviously he’s in the Hall of Fame. A guy like that, you don’t want to see him sidelined, but he sounded good on his voicemail. Sounds like he’s doing better and I wish him a speedy recovery.”  — Boyle on KU coach Bill Self’s absence due to an illness

Up next: The Buffs remain at home for a clash against a talented Central Florida team (14-4, 3-3 Big 12) on Saturday at 1 p.m. (ESPN+).