Olen's Lobos aren't about to overlook struggling Falcons

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — After Tuesday's comfortable road win at Colorado State, the UNM Lobos didn't hop on a plane and fly back to Albuquerque.

With classes out at UNM, coupled with a fairly quick turnaround from a game in Fort Collins to Saturday's 1 p.m. start time at the U.S. Air Force Academy, Eric Olen decided to keep his Lobos squad in Colorado for the week — adding some hotel bills, cutting some flight bills and loading up on some quality time together for the team that is starting to look like one of the best in the league at 12-3 and 3-1 in Mountain West play.

What he didn't cut back on in the slightest — even considering Saturday's opponent is the Air Force Falcons (3-12 overall, 0-4 Mountain West) who have lost their four home games by an average of 25.0 points per game — was preparation.

"Our preparation and all the routine (we do), it rarely changes," Olen told the Journal on Friday in Colorado Springs. "Obviously, the game time (1 p.m.), staying on the road, those are external factors. Our job is to not allow that to impact our performance."

The challenge now in a college basketball world where margins of victory, offensive and defensive efficiency numbers and style points do play into all the computer ratings — ones the Lobos have climbed in recent weeks quite impressively — is to also not allow the record of their opponent to factor into that preparation.

Especially not an Air Force team who, particularly at Clune Arena, has been well known to pick off one of the top teams in the Mountain West on a regular basis through the years, even in their worst seasons.

And the Lobos have been one of those teams more than once.

"We don't try to tell them this is the best team in our conference. We try to be honest about it, but at the same time, look at what they've done year over year," Olen said. "They're gonna get somebody and our job is to make sure we're prepared the best we can, to try to prevent that from being us."

Olen noted he sees some players on the Falcons roster who have legitimate talent that could give any team problems. Freshman guard Kam Sanders can get into the lane well and Caleb Walker is one of the nation's leaders in shooting percentage.

"If he gets the ball where he wants it on the block, he's not going to miss," Olen said.

Finished with the Front Range

With the Mountain West's unbalanced 20-game schedule, UNM will not be playing at Wyoming this year.

That means with Tuesday's win at CSU and Saturday's game at Air Force, the Lobos are already done with their three Mountain West Front Range games for the season by Jan. 10.

Old and young

The Lobos have a unique roster in that at least five players are 22 years old or older, and yet they are the only team in the country (out of 365 at the Division I level) with three freshman averaging double figures scoring.

For Air Force, it's all about the youth movement.

The Falcons enter the game with 279 total college games played to UNM's 662 and 46.9% of the team's scoring is from freshmen.

Are you registered?

There are two updates for fans planning to attend Saturday's game at the Academy.

First, the North Gate entrance, which is closer to Clune Arena and the Cadet Field House than the South Gate Entrance, reopened for the first time this season and can be used for this game.

Second, nobody is allowed on the academy campus without an online registration process that must be completed before getting to the entrance. The online form can be found at GoAirForceFalcons.com under the "Base Entry" link.

Series notes

UNM leads the all-time series with Air Force 68-27 with a 25-19 record in Clune Arena.

The Lobos won each of last year's games comfortably with the last upset in the series coming in the Pit, not Clune Arena, on Feb. 24, 2024. In that game, Rytis Petraitis hit a late 3-pointer for a 78-77 win that essentially proved to be a metrics killer for the Lobos that would have kept that roster of Jaelen House, Donovan Dent, Jamal Mashburn Jr., Nelly Junior Joseph and J.T. Toppin out of the NCAA Tournament that season had they not gone on to earn the league's automatic berth by winning the Mountain West Tournament (the NCAA Selection Committee Chair confirmed UNM would not have been in the Big Dance without the MW Tournament win, and the Air Force loss was the worst of the season for the Lobos).

Reach Geoff Grammer at ggrammer@abqjournal.com or follow him on Twitter (X) @GeoffGrammer.