Boynton Jumps on Players at Halftime, Says He’s ‘Extremely Proud’ of Iowa State Win

Mike Boynton is not one to get fired up. I realized this when he was jumping on the officials at the end of the Oklahoma State-Iowa State game. Travis Ford was as likely to threaten the TV monitor on the scorer’s table as he was to chill on the bench, but Boynton, it seems, is not wired like that.

That’s why him hollering and jumping around at the refs was so start at the end of the game in GIA. Not that it wasn’t deserved. And Boynton had apparently had a little warm up for it. After giving up a 17-2 run to Iowa State to end the first half, Boynton jumped on his squad in the locker room for playing “immature.”

Kendall Smith and Tavarius Shine said postgame it was the most animated they've seen Mike Boynton at halftime. Boynton: "We played immature basketball for the last half of the first half. We played like we thought they were going to stop playing." #okstate

— Mark Cooper (@mark_cooperjr) January 7, 2018

“They needed it, and I got the right kind of guys,” said Boynton. “I think they’d tell you that. I don’t do it often, but when it’s necessary and I feel like they need to have their cages rattled a little bit, I’ve got it in me to do it. It certainly helped. Those guys played much better the second half.”

OSU out-scored Iowa State 64-53 in the second half and overtime and was offensively solid (even if it struggled some on defense).

“Coach really got on us at halftime,” said Kendall Smith. “He got on us. So, the whole second half, we came out with a sense of urgency. We told each other that we weren’t going to lose and that we wanted this win. We did whatever it took to win. We stepped up and made good plays and came out with a victory.”

Smith was the one who shot the game into overtime with this last-second drive.

And when things looked a little desperate with OSU down 8 and less than four minutes left (I declared the game “ovah” in Slack!), Boynton said his team kept cranking. He praised them to their faces after the game and did so publicly in his press conference.

“Talk about effort and fight and competitive spirit,” said Boynton who got his first Big 12 win on Saturday. “I’m extremely proud of our guys for finding a way to keep standing in there. We got knocked in the chin a few times and kept throwing punches back, which was a great sign of encouragement for me, especially coming off the way we played the other day.

“The other fact is knowing that these guys had never beaten Iowa State. There’s a lot of things going on mentally, but for those guys to stand there and compete the way they did makes me very proud to be their coach.”

It’s true. Nobody on this year’s OSU team had ever beaten the Cyclones. Nobody on any OSU team had done so since 2013.

“I told them I liked that they fought,” said Boynton. “That’s our message. We’ve got to continue to compete at the very highest level, every possession, every night in this league to have a chance. I knew that we had five more minutes (after Smith sent it to OT). I told them it was going to be a 40-minute game before the game, and then I said, ‘Hey guys, I lied to you. We’re going to need five more minutes to get this thing done.’ And we got it done.”