Colorado State Star David Roddy Talks NCAA Tournament, NBA Draft Dreams, and More
“I dream of being drafted in the NBA, but winning a conference championship and making the NCAA tournament is front and center right now.”
Chances are you have never heard of David Roddy, unless you spend a ton of time on Instagram and/or live in Fort Collins, Colorado (a city and state where the MaximBet sportsbook is live).
He will probably never go down as the best basketball player ever to come out of Colorado State because Becky Hammon happened to go to school there once upon a time. But you are going to start hearing a whole lot more about him if he keeps playing ball the way he has been this season.
Roddy, a 6-foot-5 junior guard from Minneapolis, is averaging 20.4 points and 7.7 rebounds while shooting an astounding 58.9 percent (including 48.9 percent on 3-pointers) for the Rams, who have broken into the AP Top 25 at No. 23 after winning their first 10 games.
Roddy’s scoring average is tied for 15th-best in the NCAA Men’s Division I ranks, where folks need to be pried away with a crowbar from discussing Duke freshman Paolo Banchero, who many believe will be the No. 1 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft (well, unless Gonzaga’s Chet Holmgren starts channeling Arnold Schwarzenegger and puts some meat on his bones).
Roddy is a junior majoring in human development and family studies, and he plans to spend his senior year at school, so do not expect him to be on any 2022 Mock Draft board. But 2023? Perhaps.
“It’s my ambition. I dream of being drafted in the NBA, but winning a conference championship and making the NCAA tournament is front and center right now,” Roddy tells Maxim.com.
Banchero and Holmgren are both freshmen, and they are considered, along with Auburn’s Jabari Smith, to be the top three players in the country. But we are still early in the NCAA college basketball season, and by the time March Madness rolls around there will certainly be a bunch of players whose stock has risen.
Remaining undefeated could do that for Roddy, whose team beat Northeastern in the championship game of the U.S. Virgin Islands Paradise Jam last month en route to amassing a 10-0 record. A road game next Tuesday at No. 6 Alabama seems the biggest potential stumbling block for now.
The Rams have an ESPN+ appearance next Saturday against Tulsa after having this week off for finals week, then play No. 6 Alabama on the road on ESPN’s SEC network next Tuesday before going back to toiling in anonymity as far as national television audiences are concerned.
Then again, networks can usually add and drop games as they see fit, and there may come a point later this season, when folks will want to see the team from the Mountain West Conference with a player whose cardboard cutout is appearing in all sorts of random places courtesy of a fan who opened the account @roddy.in.the.wild.
“I have no idea who that guy is, other than he is a student and he is making use of a cardboard cutout of me,” Roddy said, amused.
Colorado State is not exactly brightly lit on the national radar, but the Rams did make it to the semifinals of the National Invitational Tournament last season, defeating Buffalo and NC State before losing to Memphis in the semifinals.
They have not made an NCAA Tournament appearance since 2013 when they defeated Missouri and then lost to top-seeded Louisville, but that was long before coach Mike Medved took over the program in 2018. The Rams went 18-6 last season and lost to Utah State in the semifinals of the Mountain West tournament.
Last season, Roddy averaged 15.9 points and 9.4 rebounds while shooting 51.2 percent overall, but he was just 27.8 percent on 3s, which makes his long-range shooting improvement all the more impressive.
Roddy said he was in the gym 5-7 days per week over the summer until he made 300 3-pointers, and during the season he is working with the school’s coaches and aiming for 150-200 made 3s per day.
One of the biggest components in his improvement is knowing the difference between a great shot (usually a wide-open one) and a good shot. Obviously, the former is better than the latter.
Roddy scored 36 points and went 7-for-10 from deep in the championship game of the tournament in the U.S. Virgin Islands, but has scored 20 or more only four times – something that will not help his NBA draft stock if he ever appears on anyone’s national radar. Currently, he does not appear in anyone’s Mock Draft.
“He is firmly on the NBA’s draft radar,” ESPN’s Jonathan Givony says. “He is one of the biggest mismatch threats as far as being able to score inside and out.”
“How many years should he stay in college? That’s really not for me to say. Some players like school a lot; other want to get out. But he has done a great job of establishing himself as a legit NBA prospect, and certainly the game against Alabama that’s coming up will be huge for him.”
Again, it has been eight years since Colorado State made the Big Dance, so the sportsbooks like MaximBet are not exactly locking them in as championship contenders.
But for those of you who like longshot wagers, especially those of you in Colorado where MaximBet is legal, the Rams are on the college basketball odds board at 200-1.
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