Colorado-Northern Iowa Quotes
Colorado Head Coach Tad Boyle
Opening Statement“Extremely disappointing loss. I thought we fought hard in the second half to come back and take the lead but our attention to detail is just not good enough right now. It was really evident tonight by the way we guarded. There were stretches in the game where we just kind of fell asleep and expected good things to happen. You have to make good things happen for yourselves and that's what Northern Iowa did. Northern Iowa out executed us tonight. They deserved to win. We did not. My hats off to them, but I'm really disappointed in our attention to detail.”
On Defensive Execution Tonight
“The number one thing on our board is always transition defense because we want to make sure people don't score in transition, but we knew they would shoot threes in transition, which they did a couple of times. The number one thing to not let Northern Iowa come in and beat us is we have to take away their threes. That was the number one thing. The last thing on our defensive game plan was we have to limit them to one shot because they will offensive rebound. I mean Phyfe had four offensive rebounds in six and a half minutes in the first half. That's hard to do. That might be an NCAA record. 15 offensive rebounds and 14 made threes, and those are the two keys to your defensive game plan. Boy, that's the attention to detail I'm talking about, and some of the guys, you know, they were hitting threes and they're looking at the bench like, what's just happene. We watch film on these guys, we had a scouting report on these guys. There were four guys on our board that we had to get to. Berhow was the first one, shooting 52%. Green is taking eight a game. He's a capable shooter, obviously showed that tonight. And shooters make shots, you know, I was proud of Lucas. Lucas made shots tonight, but we did not execute down the stretch. That last possession, we had a play called, we did not obviously run the play. I probably should have called a timeout. You kick yourself as a coach, but you're at a free throw situation, clock is stopped, and we got our play call. Let’s execute our play. But we didn't even a play. So that gets down to our guys trusting each other and trusting the situation and right now we don't. That was obvious on that possession. I look at the last four minutes of the first half and we got a four to five-point lead. So, the next four minutes are a big, big time of the game. We can expand this lead by getting stops and getting scores, but it went the other way, and they took the lead. That four-minute stretch really hurt us and then obviously coming out of halftime. Our guys weren't ready to play. They score nine points and timeout. But again, to our guys credit they fought back, we took the lead. But we couldn't hold on to it because we couldn't stop them from three and we couldn't limit them to one shot.”
On Trae Berhow’s Three Point Shooting
“He's gonna make some tough ones, but we talked about it after he made the first couple. Don't let him catch the ball on the three-point line, you let him catch the ball on the three-point line he's got a high release, he's got a quick release, we know that, we talked about that. But we were letting him catch the ball where he wanted to catch it. You got to pressure him out on the floor or make him go back door and shoot a two. Tyler's good at the rim defensively, Evans a great charge taker. But man, you let that kid get off and you know it coming in, that's really, really hard to live with. I mean five for six. He’s a good player.”
On What Was Said Before Tonight’s Game
“I said it before, I said it after practice Monday. This was a trap game. Now the players understand why I said that. I think our fans may understand why I said that. I've got to do a better job coaching these guys, that's obvious. We shoot 55% the second half, pretty darn good. 38% in the first half. We're trying to do stuff on our own and we're not good enough. We don't have good enough players to do things on our own. We have to play together on offense and trust each other and trust the system. Right now, we don't do either.”
On The 18 Turnovers
“All shapes and sizes, all different players. We tried to go to a more continuity offense in the second half, we ran motion the first half, we ran the continuity offense the second half thinking that maybe the continuity will give our guys a little bit more structure. We only turned it over eight times in the second half. That's still too many, that’s 16 for the game. 18 is what we've been averaging the last three games. There we are again. Shot 38% in first half, there we are again. We played well enough offensively in the second half to win but we weren't good enough defensively. Northern Iowa deserved it, we didn’t. Bottom line.”
On Getting Outrebounded
“Our league is good. We need all five guys rebounding the ball defensively. Offensively, we had 10 offensive rebounds, which is pretty good. But second chance points, we have not been beaten in that category all year until tonight. Iowa deserved to win. We didn’t.”
On Correcting The Turnovers
“I don't know the answer that because we haven't changed them in nine games. I think what's happened the last two games is the teams you're playing are better than the teams we played in the first handful of games. So those turnovers now come back to bite you. I've said that before. Now, defensively we've been able to guard well enough to overcome that, tonight we weren't able to do that. You run into teams that are good. Northern Iowa is a good team and I knew it when we scheduled them. I knew it, as this game came up, and I tried my hardest to get our team to understand that and to respect them. I don't think we were overlooking Northern Iowa, I really don't. Our players would have to answer that. But we did not execute well enough offensively, we didn't take care of the ball, we didn't take away their threes which was the number one thing, and we gave them 15 offensive rebounds, which is the second thing we had to eliminate. It's really not a complicated issue. It's a little bit more challenging to fix it. I'm gonna keep trying the best I can do to help these guys make simple plays. Watching film is the best way I know how. They gotta take it upon themselves to have a little bit more pride in taking care of the ball. Not making home runs plays, just make simple plays. That’s all you have to do; the game is simple and we make it hard.”
Colorado Players
McKinley Wright IV, Jr., G
On not getting any stops“They just executed better than us, the entire night. They're a high executing team and they did that.”
On Ball Pressure at the tie (76-76)
“We had a set call and they double-teamed me off the ball screen. I was trying to hit the short roller and their back side came up to help and jumped the pass. I should've just kept it and called a timeout. I made a mistake, made the wrong read.”
On lack of game-plan execution
“We've seen everything that they ran. We saw it on film. We didn't execute our game plan. We didn't execute our personnel. We were close enough, hard on drivers, let them get to the paint, and get easy dunk offs. We knew Trae Berhow was a very good shooter with a high release. We didn't take away his threes at all. He was five for six, that's 20 points, five of them threes. Four of them came in the second half. He got in foul trouble in the first half, came out in the second and didn't miss.”
On going forward
“We have got to get back to the drawing board and get back to us. We need to get back to how we felt early before these last two or three games that we were a top 10 team in the country for field goal percentage. We didn't showcase that in our last three games. We need to get back to the drawing board, come together as a team and just keep going. We'll be okay.”
Lucas Siewert, Sr., Forward
On his all-time high points“I just got into a rhythm and that's always good when that happens. It wasn't enough to get the result we wanted so it doesn't really matter much.”
Northern Iowa Head Coach Ben Jacobson
On win and Gatorade bath"Yeah that's the best kind. When you go in there and the guys know they've accomplished something and tonight, didn't feel right (at the start), felt a little bit out of sync in the first half but battled hard enough defensively to hold them (Buffs) down or maybe when I go and look at it, they may have missed some shots, whichever of the two happened, we came in with the lead and we didn't make a lot of great decisions in the first half, so we thought we could do better."
On dealing with crowd noise
"When they got the lead late, that's what we feel really good about. We had to come back one more time. That put us in position to win the game and we did."
On run to end first half and start second half
“To close out the first half, we had a different group in there. We sat Trae (Berhow) for the rest of the half after his technical and that group soft of settled in. They were playing well, we did a good job defensively and then onto start the second half, Trae (Berhow) made a three, maybe two, but again at halftime we had more energy and felt like we could play better offensively than we did in the first half."
On possession following late timeout
"Great execution by the guys. We had practiced defending McKinley (Wright IV) a few different ways and we had not trapped him yet and we felt that we were here to win. That's a play we had practiced a lot but we haven't done that a lot in games and we hadn't done that tonight and the execution was perfect"
On Trae Berhow performance
"Most important to me is that he learns. I'm done with it. He's lucky he had a bunch of assistant coaches stick up for him or otherwise I wasn't going to play him in the 2nd half. He's old enough now, he's gonna learn. That's the most important thing, he has to and will learn. When he came back, he came through for his team and I told you on Monday how proud I am of him and he's doing so great. It's time to take one more step and he will. He played great in the second half, some of those shots he made, he was terrific"
On Justin Dahl’s performance
"He's been awesome. Last year, he was coming off the bench every night, playing small minutes and this year, when we started he wasn't playing at all. We had moved a freshman ahead of him and Phyfe was back from his medical redshirt. He moved from 15-18 minutes a night to nothing. He stayed with it at practice, he's a fifth year senior whose working really hard, has a lot of confidence and whether he plays or not, it doesn't impact him and he's having a blast. He loves what's going on with his teammates. It's fun when you have a fifth year senior who isn't a starter or playing 35 minutes like all of the limelight having as much fun as he is and having the impact he is."
On beating ranked opponent
"We keep getting better. We're going to continue to see that with AJ (Green) and (Austin) Phyfe just sophomores, three freshman coming off the bench for us. We have young guys that are playing for us. We need to keep getting better and better. Tonight, that was a terrific team. Our guys learned that we are capable against one of the best teams in the country."
On game’s biggest difference maker
"Trey (Berhow) made big threes in the second half to keep them from getting away from us. And I think, the guys just dug in and those last three minutes when the momentum was going back to Colorado, those guys stepped up and made plays."
On controlling momentum
“I think it just speaks to where we are at right now. We are going to grow and be a lot better, two or three weeks from now. But I'm saying that because we're playing pretty good right now. We answered the bell. They feel great about beating a good team tonight. I'm just happy for the guys. We had to step up in those last three minutes. I'm just happy for the guys."