Postgame Quotes - Lipscomb at Belmont - Jan. 6, 2012
Belmont head coach Rick Byrd
Opening statement
“I felt that the team that wanted to win, and played the hardest, won the game tonight. Their kids deserve a great deal of credit. They made hustle plays. They got loose balls, offensive rebounds, and long rebounds. I told our team that the team that plays hard, the breaks seem to fall their way. I thought they had a great plan. They were certainly much more prepared for this game than we were, from a coaching stand point. Lipscomb deserves a lot of credit. I do think that it’s not any fun to lose this game. It’s not any fun to lose any game, but it’s been a long, long time since we’ve been upset. If you want to say that last year’s loss at their place was an upset, you can, but they were picked to win the league and it was on their home floor. I don’t remember when we’ve been upset before that. It’s a long, long stretch, so I’m proud of what our team has accomplished. There aren’t many people who can go back over a year and a half and say that they haven’t been upset. This was an upset, based on where the teams were at the time, and how they’ve played to this point, but they outplayed us and deserved to win.”
On if the team thought they had the game after the LU technical:
“I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. We all play 30 plus games a year and there are a lot of games when you’re up 12 with 12 minutes to go in the game, and it’s still anybody’s game. It’s a blur at this point to me how they came back and won. They had several kids make some huge shots. I thought Jacob Arnett was a real plus in the game for them. He was shooting 28% from three and he came right out and knocked them down. He knocked some tough ones down. They took advantage of a mismatch better than we took advantage of a mismatch. We put some stuff in to try to post up our other post player on him, because he’s a small four man, and we didn’t execute it very well. They scored on their stuff. We didn’t score on our stuff. That usually means that team wins.”
On Belmont players losing their composure:
“I thought we lost our composure from the beginning. I thought we had a lot of guys trying to make individual plays outside of the scope of our concept on offense. Some of Kerron’s drives ended up without anything good happening, but Kerron has made so many good things happening doing that this year. They did a good job of cutting him off, and he was out of control a little bit. He didn’t make good choices at the end of those every time. I thought we should be the team playing with composure, and I didn’t feel like we did 40 minutes worth. Just like our loss last year, over there, we had a whole lot of wide open shots in the second half that didn’t go in. Their guys were making shots and ours weren’t. That’s how you keep score.”
On attempting to stop the late Lipscomb run:
“Oh it’s real frustrating. Momentum is an amazing thing in any sport. It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing somebody in racquetball, or tennis, or golf, or watching teams play one another, momentum is the real deal. I don’t know whether the technical created some – I don’t think they had any reason to be made at us at what happened there – but if anything it should have energized us more than it energized them. We were a tired team late. I have to play more players more minutes. I have a lot of confidence in Kerron, Drew, and Ian, and I want them in the game all the time, but we were tired late. We weren’t able to defend like we needed to defend when you’ve got catch up. It’s one thing to miss shots, but you’ve got to be able to stop folks. The two back screen plays were really poor team defense by us. They were great calls by them, and great looks, but those were the two back-breaker plays.”
On Lipscomb’s defense of Hedgepeth and Saunders:
“They were collapsing on them as soon as they caught it, so we had to hope to get some in and out scoring. It was difficult for them to have room to score it in there, and we need to do a better job of taking advantage of that. They’ve played us in different ways over the years, but mostly played behind us. When we’ve got Mick out there, his man would double, and we didn’t take advantage of that with him cutting to the basket like we could have.”
On the Battle of the Boulevard:
“The games haven’t been as close here recently. When [Lipscomb Coach] Scott [Sanderson] first got in the league, it seemed like we had overtime games every time. They [the games] haven’t been as good recently, but it’s the toughest game for us to lose…a Lipscomb game on our floor. We’ve won the league after losing a Lipscomb game on our floor before, and it is one loss out of 18 conference games. Two or three days down the road, we’ll realize that, instead of the fact that we don’t like to lose to Lipscomb just like they don’t like to lose to Belmont. We’re ahead of them in the standings. We’re ahead of a lot of people in the standings. That’s the object.”
