Just now; Tennessee basketball head coach send a brutal and an astonishing message to Louisville head coach and entire team
Opening Statement)
“Obviously extremely disappointed, [the KFC] Yum! Center was electric, we asked people to come out, they came out big. It was as elite of a college basketball atmosphere as you’re going to find anywhere. The fact of the matter is, they were the better team tonight. [Tennessee] punched us in the mouth from the very beginning. The only way to describe it is they beat us in almost every single facet of the game. My message to the players after the game was, I told them the one thing that they don’t have to worry about is us being good. The one thing they don’t have to worry about is us being good. We’re going to become a good team. I believe that, deep down in my soul, with every single fiber of my being, and we’ve got a long way to go. It was a heck of a test, obviously, we’ve got to credit Coach [Rick] Barnes and his staff and his players. Like I said, we take pride in rebounding, effort, deflections those type of things, and got our butt kicked on the glass. I don’t know what it was exactly, but [rebounding] was like plus fifteen, I think it was on the glass. I felt like their physicality on the defensive end really disrupted our rhythm. We’re a rhythm offensive team. I thought they took us out of what we wanted to do, and it forced us, not forced us, but it turned into too much one on one, too much dribbling, which is one hundred percent not how we play on the offensive end. It’s the first time this team has gotten punched in the mouth and faced adversity since June 5th, when I stood up here at my press conference and we signed this team. They’ve had a lot of ‘atta boys’ and a lot of pats on the back and a lot of high fives. I mean what I’ve said over the last eight months, whatever it is, five months since this team’s been together, they’ve been phenomenal. It’s a really, really good group, and I do believe, with everything I got, that this team is going to end up being really good. But, for the first time, [we] got hit in the mouth and [we’re] going to face adversity. My challenge to them in the locker room was not the X’s and O’s that we have to clean up, because there’s a lot of them, like I said, almost every facet of the game I thought they were better than us today, but that’s for tomorrow, that’s for tonight at 2AM when I’m watching tape and I’m breaking down, cleaning up the X’s and O’s, ball screen execution at both ends of the floor, our defensive ball screen, whatever it is. But that meeting in [the locker room] was about walking out and having our circle tighter than ever. Walking out of that room and having a resolve about them. As they go back to their dorms, and like all kids do, and they check their social media, and [listening] to all the people that [have] been telling them how good they are, [or] just crushing them, because that’s how it is, that’s the world. I just told them, don’t blink. Don’t blink. Look to the guy to the right of you, look to the guy next to you, love him more than ever. Don’t blame anybody else. Don’t complain about anything else, don’t get defensive. Just know that we’ve got to go back to work on Monday and get better, and we will.”
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