“Probably 50-50 balls, but it’s also a mental thing. When it’s late, four or five minutes to go in a game, you know, you’re tough enough that I’m not turning it over because I’m tough enough to know I’m making easy plays. Turnovers lead to easy baskets down the other end. We gave 21 points up last game from turnovers. You can’t win a game that way. The other thing becomes, it’s a 50-50 ball and I’m fighting for my life, I figure out a way to go and get those balls. Now, you may not get all of them, but you can’t give them all of them. The toughness late in the game, mentally and physically, that’s what I’m talking about.” 

“Casual play. I showed them all 17. We went through all 17. Was it necessary? Aggressive turnovers don’t lead to baskets down the other end. The causal turnovers, were you just dribbling across and just lose it? What happened? Did he grab you? ‘No, it just kind of got away from me.’ Excuse me? That’s the casual. The look away pass to a win when you didn’t have to. What’s the hardest play I can make? When the guy is open right there throw it. We saw it. This is all stuff that, when you’re coaching young kids, you have to go through and reinforce. We went back to some of our older defensive drills just to get them in a different mindset, but Georgia’s good. I just watched their game with Texas. They had Texas A&M beat. The Alabama game was a little bit of an anomaly for them, but they’re a good team. We don’t play, you get beat again. I think we’ll be ready to play. How the game plays out, I don’t know. We’ll see.” 

“Yeah, they are. One scoring 20 a game, the other scoring 17. Maten has hurt us over the years simply by being physical. So it is a tough matchup for us. ”

“Well, part of it is, toughness is mental, too. Your approach to how you are doing this. So, you’re thinking toughness, you push people around and shove people. That is part of it. That is that you are in a scrum. Did you dive on the floor? Why wouldn’t you dive? ‘My elbow hurts and I didn’t feel like.’ That’s – so you do drills to get them to do it. Dive on the floor, take charges, one-on-one rebounding. Fight! They learn to fight. So you can teach that. But the bigger part of that is, when games are winding down, having a refuse-to-lose attitude. Which doesn’t mean you win every day, every game. But the approach is, I am focused, I am making easy plays, I’m attacking. All the things that you have to do defensively. The toughness you have to have to hold your ground, to stay in a stance late in a game with everything swirling. That is a toughness you have to have. You know, and again, I said before the game, my one worry was, they had been in all close games except West Virginia. Every game was close. And their guards pulled every one of those games out. Their guards did. And our guards hadn’t been in enough close games. And when we were, we were turning it over late. And so that’s the issue that we’re dealing with. All this stuff is fixable. I’ve got a terrific team. I mean, I’ve still got the same guys that if we had won two games we would have had votes for No. 1. And I would have said, ‘We’re not No. 1 because we still have these issues.’ We practiced yesterday and we’re going to get after it a little bit today and see what goes on Tuesday.”

“Well, because on the ball it started with De’Aaron Fox. And so, when your defense starts there and then you have an Isaiah Briscoe and then you have a Malik Monk – but that defense starts on that ball. You have to be able to go up and play people. You have Dom (Hawkins). So yesterday we had individual meetings and then we had a team meeting. In one of my individual meetings I asked all of the guys, ‘Can you be a stopper?’ A couple said, ‘Someday I hope to be.’ But there were five or six that said, ‘I can be,’ or ‘I’m a stopper.’ Well, then why are people scoring on us like they are if you’re a stopper? So, you know, it’s – I love getting with them and just finding out, like, you know, ‘Do you have an idea of how I want you to play?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, tell me. How do I want you to play?’ Because the easy thing is, ‘Yeah. No. Ah.’ ‘Okay, so tell me.’ So, this is a group – it’s like I said – I am, I’m not panicked. I wanted to win the game. You guys know me well enough, I’m fighting throughout the game. And when I watched it, I walked away after watching the tape like, ‘OK, this stuff’s all fixable.’ If it wasn’t fixable I would have a different approach. But, the other side I would tell you is, we’ve got good kids. I mean, I’ve got a great group of kids. They want me to tell them. The only thing I said – we watched a little tape before I walked out here – when you watch the tape, I did less coaching last year than I’m having to do now. And that’s a big thing. You know every year I say the same thing. Until this team is empowered and it’s their team — until they’re doing this off of one another, understanding what each of them have to do and talking and – until their empowered, they can’t be the team they can be. They’re still good, good team and good players. But you’ve gotta be empowered. Gotta be their team, not mine. They can’t expect me – someone would say, ‘You know, you don’t like calling timeouts.’ I’ve said this over the years: Why wouldn’t you have called a timeout? Because I need them to work through it. I’m not going to call timeout every time there’s trouble. Work through it. I’m not out there; you’re out there. So this is all kind of what we buy into every year.”

“Well, we’re playing a smaller team, and we really should be a better shot-blocking team than we are, but what’s happened is we’re not blocking the shots we should block. Now, as you say that, I think we’re second or third in the league in blocked shots? Top 10 nationally, so not the greatest shot-blocking team, but we’re pretty good. The issue becomes straight-line drives. The issue becomes whoever is guarding the ball. You’ve got to get up in this guy. You’ve got to disrupt them. See if you can’t disrupt a team by just playing defense then you’ve got to trick. Then you’ve got to play trapping. You’ve got to play different kinds of zones. If you can disrupt them man-to-man, you don’t have to do all that. We’re just trying to figure out – again, as coaches, you sit there and look and say, ‘OK, how do we help these kids?’ That was one of my questions in the individual meetings” ‘What else can I do to help you play the way you’re capable of playing? Is it a way of coaching you? Is there something else I can do in the game to get you – what kind of shot? My job – this is not about me. This is about you being your best version. So how do we do this?’ I’m not here to beat them down. I get on them at practice. We’re going to go hard. We went hard yesterday. We didn’t go long, but we’re really working on the things they need.”

“I told some of them. Some of them say something like, ‘You know, Coach, I want you to coach me and I want you to challenge me.’ I said, ‘Listen, if you sleep on it and you come up with something then come and see me. We’ll talk about it because I’m just trying to get you to play as what you’re capable.’ A couple of guys said, ‘You know I’m not even near where I should be. I don’t know what’s going on.’ I asked, ‘Are you hitting that wall? Is that part of it?’ ‘No, absolutely not.’ OK, let’s figure this out then.”

“In practice you’re doing drills, and doing things that it’s confidence. Look, it’s a skill to be like a hard, scrappy player. That’s a skill just like ball-handling and shooting is a skill. Fighting for rebounds – it’s a skill. Well, if passing, and dribbling and shooting can be taught and mastered then so can that other stuff. They’re all a skill, so you get in here and you make them fight each other. You put the guards and the bigs and you put Tai (Wynyard), and Bam (Adebayo) against guys that don’t want to fight and let them just maul them. Then you’re like, OK, if you want to accept that let go of the rope. Then you can’t be playing. So figure out how do I do this that I can withstand all this stuff. Alright, let me go practice.”