Utah State Aggies

Dec. 31, 2001

LOGAN, Utah -

Recapping last weeks action...

"Obviously we're happy to win the (Gossner Foods Classic) tournament again. We played, I thought, two real good halves - the second half of both games. The first halves were just okay. Watching the tapes and everything, we defended pretty well and shot the ball well in the second half of both games. Obviously, Tony Brown had a great tournament."

Looking ahead to Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara this weekend...

"It's kind of weird the way it was this year, having played two league games then come back to non-league with the Gossner Classic. You turn around and then you jump back into league. And that's were our emphasis is. We're playing the most improved team (Cal Poly) in the league and arguably the best team (UC Santa Barbara) in the league. There's a lot of talk, and I'm sure we're in the mix as far as the talk around the league, but UC Santa Barbara and Irvine are getting a lot of attention. And Pacific just hammered Nebraska by about 25, so things keep going on that show the league is up like all the coaches have been saying. I think the scores have been proving that. Cal Poly is like 100 percent improved. They're 7-3 and they've pretty much abandoned all the pressing stuff they used to do. You just don't see hardly any of that. They've just tried to become much more solid on both ends of the court. I think they've accomplished that. Plus they have a premier inside guy that just causes you fits (Varnie Dennis). He is a load. Watching him play on tape, he's similar to Shawn Daniels in that he's such a wide body that you really have a hard time guarding him. He's left handed, so that's always a little bit odd. He shoots such a high percentage. What happens is they run four-out motion with him in the center and they're moving you all around. You try to get to their other players. Meanwhile it frees him up inside. I'm just impressed with the improvement they've made. Obviously, all you have to do is look at Santa Barbara's scores and their field-goal defense to know how solid they are and how well they're playing with basically everybody back. It will be a challenging, challenging road trip for us. But as I said the other night, we're ready to get out on the road. It's time to see. We've been home for a long time and it's been nice, but it gets to the point where you need to get out and see what you can do, see how you can perform in league road games. We start out with a very tough trip."

On how the team will respond to the first road trip of the year in league...

"It's hard to say how this group will respond to all the different factors on the road. One thing that I don't like with this particular trip is we're leaving to get a flight to Santa Barbara, which made sense. We have to practice Wednesday at the site and that's not awful when you're not in school. We always practice at home so we can go to school longer on this first day of the road trip. It does, for some reason, when you leave at 7:30 a.m. on Wednesday, tend to make the trip a little longer than if you are practicing at home. But we need to find out some things about how we respond - being on the road for five days - how we respond the second game. Often with a lot of college basketball teams, the first game out you're pretty energized. Second game out, a lot of teams don't play with near the energy because they're tired quite frankly. Tired of the travel, tired of the change in routine, all those kinds of things. I'm not big into being tired. You can't ever accept those kinds of things. All of the sudden you're in different environments, too. You learn a lot about your team on the road. The schedule fell so that we didn't have to travel a whole lot and now we're jumping into it every other week, basically."

About Cal Poly and the support they get from the community...

"Being 7-3, Cal Poly is going to get a lot better support. That San Luis Obispo area has always been supportive of the college team there. It's not a big metropolitan area. It's more of a college-type area. I think that helps them. I think they're excited about what their team is doing. They beat Oregon State from the Pac-10 and went to Eastern Washington, which is a good Big Sky team, and won. They've got a number of good wins."

"You watch them on tape and you go, 'Man, they are a lot better.' That's a credit to their new coach and to the kids buying into the system. They seem to play much more unselfish than in the past. They have a much better feel for team basketball. They're better defensively. They're just better, 100 percent better in every phase of the game."

"Eric Jackson is a good solid player. He's just a good all-around player. He can shoot it a little bit. His percentages aren't great right now, but he looks like he can shoot it on film. He's kind of a rugged kid. He's an older kid. He just gives them the stability that they haven't had with some of their guys."

"They've always been a good rebounding team since I've been playing them. They go to the boards hard. We've been solid rebounding-wise and that will be a huge key in the game. Who can win the rebounding battle?"

About Utah State's man-to-man defense thus far this year...

"Our man-to-man defense is a work in progress. You keep plugging away at it. We've been able to play a lot more man-to-man. We've focused on playing a lot more man in games. We felt like we had to get our man up to par so that we didn't have to totally rely on our zone. Through the years, when we go on the road, we play a little more changing defense. That's our way to try to control the tempo a little bit. We try to keep people a little less comfortable at home. I think if you play just one straight defense for 40 minutes the whole team would wear out. Through the years our changing defense has been good to us on the road. We've been emphasizing our man this week, now we have to go back and get comfortable with our changing defense again."

On the tempo of play this weekend...

"I always tell them, 'Don't you worry about tempo. I'll worry about tempo.' They just need to play. We can control tempo through a variety of ways. Number one, if you don't have good transition defense, you can't control tempo because they're getting easy baskets. The area of concern is, we haven't played a lot of changing defense. And some of our tempo looks offensively haven't been as good this year. We run a false motion to a play. That concerns me a little bit because that's been good to us through the years. The last couple years in particular, our guys have understood that when we run a false motion, bang, we need to go to a play hard and execute it. This group hasn't been as good at that, yet. Sometimes when we talk about tempo we still score 75 or 80 points, but it's on our terms. Sometimes it's 60 points. We don't go in and play one straight defense. There are times that you want to run false motion when the crowd is going crazy or if the pace of the game isn't the way you like it. We often times have done more of the tempo control."

On Cal Poly's defense...

"They concentrate more on their half court defense. They're not at the level of Santa Barbara's defense. Santa Barbara's defense is spectacular right now. But Cal Poly is much improved."

On how physical Utah State has been over the years and how physical UC Santa Barbara is playing this year...

"We're constantly harping about being physical. The kids know that soft is not a good term. Soft is not a word that we want to use to describe our team. It's not as easy to be physical if you have a lot of skinny guys running around. Santa Barbara has a lot of guys who have been in the weight room, a bunch of physical specimen looking guys. That will be a key part of the game if they out-physical us."

On beating UC Santa Barbara the past couple of times...

"Santa Barbara will have great motivation. Some of our guys won't understand why they're so motivated. We played well against them a couple of times. Bobby (Williams) was very gracious. I remember we lost a couple of league games and he said, 'You just needed us to show up and then you were okay.' He was joking, but we have great respect for their system. Bobby has been coaching a long time and he's a very good coach. They are hard to prepare for, they do so many different things. Those guys who are now a year older and certainly a year better are going to be laying in the weeds waiting for the Aggies to show up."

On the depth of the team...

"I'm concerned about our depth situation on the road. You get in foul trouble more on the road. We've had to play a couple guys more minutes than we'd like to. We had more experienced guys coming of the bench last year, especially at the two and three positions. We'll have to see how that goes."