After his team’s loss to Iowa State last Saturday at the Huntsman Center, Utah women’s basketball coach Gavin Petersen said the Utes are “disconnected” to start games at home, and he’s not sure why.
With three weeks left in the regular season, Utah has three more home games before the Big 12 tournament.
That includes games against Cincinnati this Saturday, BYU on Feb. 21 and Arizona on Feb. 28 in the regular-season finale.
“This is a place where we should not be losing and we’re great on the road with our focus and intensity,” Petersen said. “We need to bottle that up and protect home court during the Big 12, so we get another shot at it when we go to Tempe next week and then come home against Cincinnati.”
First up is a road trip to Arizona State on Wednesday (6:30 p.m. MST, ESPN+), where the Utes will try and earn a bit of redemption for a 69-68 loss to the Sun Devils at the Huntsman Center earlier this season.
Utah (16-8, 7-5 Big 12) is tied for sixth in the Big 12 standings, one game ahead of Arizona State (19-6, 6-6 Big 12).
Wednesday’s game is likely to play heavily into seeding for next month’s conference tournament. The top eight seeds all receive a first-round bye, a position the Utes are squarely in line for, and if they improve to top four by season’s end, they’d get a double-bye to the quarterfinals.
After Wednesday’s contest, three of Utah’s final five games will be at home, before the Big 12 tournament, which runs March 4-8 at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.
The Utes are currently being projected as an NCAA tournament team, around a No. 10 or No. 11 seed, and are viewed as being on the right side of the bubble for now.
Any sort of slip-up against a team that Utah is projected to beat, though, could be extremely damaging to the Utes’ hopes of making the NCAAs for a fifth straight season.
Utah is 4-4 in its last eight games, after starting off Big 12 play 3-1.
At this point, the Utes are also 8-5 in games at the Huntsman Center. Those five home losses are already more than they’ve had since the 2020-21 season, when Utah went 5-16 overall.
Five home losses is the same number the Utes have had over the past three seasons combined.
That includes going 2-4 at home in Big 12 play, with the aforementioned three remaining home games against three teams all in the bottom half of the league standings.
“I don’t know if it’s going to take us coming back from a loss again to regroup, but we’ve got to try to sustain, especially here at home,” Petersen said.
Could Utah’s home woes be as simple as an elevated level of competition?
The Utes have played four ranked teams in conference play, and all those games were at home. Utah went 2-2 in those contests, beating TCU and West Virginia, with losses to Baylor and Texas Tech.
Iowa State, which beat the Utes 79-72, was also ranked at one point — as a top 10 team, before a four-game losing streak knocked them out of the rankings.
Utah’s lone home loss in nonconference play came against a ranked opponent, No. 25 Washington.
One worrying trend is the offensive woes Utah is experiencing at home in several of their recent games at the Huntsman Center.
In a 16-point loss to Baylor, Utah shot 26.2% from the floor and just 3 of 25 from 3-point range.
Ten days later, the Utes lost to Texas Tech by 28 points on a night where they shot 32.7% from the floor and 3 of 16 from beyond the arc.
In both of those games, Utah failed to score 50 points.
In the loss to Iowa State, the Utes scored just 27 first-half points and were 5 of 18 from the field in the third quarter, when the Cyclones broke open the game and led by as many as 19 points.
Oddly enough, the Utes are 8-1 on the road this season, including 5-1 in conference action.
Petersen is searching for answers that will make the Utes protect their home court like they’ve become accustomed to in recent years.
“The next three games at home, we’ve got to try to protect home court. I don’t know if that’s a lack of focus on our players’ part or too many distractions, but we’ve got to challenge them to really do their part, almost like we do on the road,” the coach said.
“Because on the road, we’re sharp, we’re focused, we’re ready to go, we take care of our bodies. We’re not doing things we shouldn’t be doing or staying out too late. It’s like we’re locked in. And so we got to get that formula, and when we’re in our own beds here, we got to try to make it work for us.”