ORLANDO, Fla. -- Following Friday afternoon’s American Athletic Conference Championship quarter final win over SMU Mick Cronin and select players met with the media to discuss the win.
BearcatReport.com was in attendance and has a few quotes from Cronin and the players plus the full video below.
THE MODERATOR: We'll start with an opening statement from Coach and then take questions for the student-athletes and Coach.
MICK CRONIN: My opening statement is please ask questions of the players first, so they can go back and get some rest. Other than that, congratulations to SMU for showing the character that they have shown for the last two months of playing with half their team injured. And five weeks of Ben Emelogu playing with his shooting hand injured and couldn't take a shot, but he was still out there. So we have great respect for their program. So it was, for me, it was good to see them come down here and play as well as they have played down here, because they have had some unbelievably bad luck. That being said, the guys played hard enough to get a win in the second half. We picked it up on the defensive end, picked it up on the back board, and in honor of my Coach Huggins outfit today, we won without making shots, which he taught me 20 years ago.
THE MODERATOR: We'll take questions, please.
Q. Cane and Gary and Kyle, nothing from the perimeter almost at all, all day today. Were they that good defensively or were you struggling that much offensively?
CANE BROOME: They definitely played hard and we just didn't hit shots today, but granted them, they played hard defense, they rotated very well. GARY CLARK: Yeah, what Cane was saying. When teams are scrambling hard and playing hard, shots aren't always going to fall, so that's why you got to play defense like we did the second half.
KYLE WASHINGTON: I just think it showed our versatility for us to be able to go inside. Gary got it going in the second half a little bit, and then you can't forget about Naz (Nysier) and Tre, they did a good job on our progressions on the zone offense, so I was happy about that. We just prevailed and we stayed persistent, so I was happy about that for our team.
Q. For anybody, start with Gary, a team like SMU, heavy underdog to you guys, they're ahead four, five, six points, you're locked into the NCAA Tournament but is there any concern by you guys that, hey, if we lose this game, maybe we drop a seed, something like that? How concerned were you guys as that game got deeper and deeper?
GARY CLARK: That's always a worry, but we're playing for more and we have to lock in and get defensive stops. You always want to try to get momentum, take each game, get momentum going on further.
