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STATE FARM MISSOURI VALLEY CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 5, 2017

St. Louis, Missouri - Arch Madness

Wichita State - 71

Illinois State - 51

THE MODERATOR: Tournament champion Wichita State Shockers are with us. Rashard Kelly, Landry Shamet, Darral Willis, Jr., head coach Gregg Marshall, Markis McDuffie, and Conner Frankamp are on the dais.

Before we begin with a statement from the head coach, I just want to say on behalf of the Missouri Valley Conference, congratulations and best wishes for Bob Lutz, who is retiring after this year. He has covered every tournament here in St. Louis for Wichita, and we thank him for his dedication. Thank you very much.

Now we have a statement on the game for head coach Gregg Marshall, and then we'll go to questions for the five student-athletes up here.

GREGG MARSHALL: Bob, happy retirement. I wish you well. Look forward to seeing you as you relax. But don't ask me about the Bradley situation today. There we go. Right, I know you are.

We'll get right into it. I thought we played very well against a very good team. I thought it was a very thorough performance. We defended well. We made our free throws. We got the ball inside. We rebounded well. We shot it well. So that results in a 20-point win, and that's hard to do against that team.

Q. For the players who have an answer to this, what clicked for this team since the loss to Illinois State in January? In your minds, what was the big difference from then to now?
THE MODERATOR: We're going to have Rashard and Conner answer that one.

RASHARD KELLY: I think what clicked, I mean, we hate to lose, but I think at that point in time, it was the basketball gods looking out for us, opening our eyes. We went back and watched film of that game and realized 1 through 16 nobody played a good game or up to their potential. Every day just pushed ourselves to reach and do the best we can.

I think it kind of carried over since then, and I think that loss against Illinois State was kind of a wakeup call for us.

CONNER FRANKAMP: Yeah, I think that kind of woke us up after losing to Illinois State. And then after that loss, we got right back to it and started working extremely hard and trying to fix anything that was going wrong with the team. We did a great job of doing that, and like I said, this team came together really well, and it worked out well for us.

Q. Markis, would you describe the defensive philosophy. Making it difficult for Paris Lee, that was kind of the number one thing that Wichita State wanted to do today?
MARKIS McDUFFIE: Our biggest thing was box out and rebound. We knew we were going to play defense. That's our biggest thing every game. We're not worried about that. We have to check out and be the tougher team.

Q. Landry, MiKyle McIntosh, that was the matchup I was concerned with. How do you defend him? That's kind of a different position than you normally guard?
LANDRY SHAMET: We knew the length of Brown to start the game would bother Paris Lee a little bit because we had success with that at home on the matchup. So just Conner on Wills, and then I took McIntosh. I guard Rashard in practice sometimes. They have similar body types, and Brown too.

So it was just my matchup, my assignment, and I had to just go do it.

Q. This is for any of the players. You guys don't have to worry about it now, not that you wouldn't get the autobid, but were you thinking about brackets, bubbles, anything leading up to this game?
THE MODERATOR: Darral and then Markis.

DARRAL WILLIS, JR.: Markis, you can answer that.

MARKIS McDUFFIE: It don't matter who we play. It's just a great feeling to know we're in the tournament the whole week. If we'd have lost, it would have been kind of stressful to think about the whole week, about the loss. Now that we got this win, we can just work to get better.

It don't matter who we play and what bracket. It's all about us.

DARRAL WILLIS, JR.: I agree.

Q. Conner, this one's for you. I'm doing a column on your coach. I saw with 8:27 to play, you guys were up 27 points, and he was stomping his feet angrily because somebody did something. Can you talk about that drive, that move to be better? You're already winning, but just that drive that he instills in you guys.
CONNER FRANKAMP: It's unbelievable. He pushed us every single day to be the best players we can be as well as the best people we can be. We go out there and try to please him and he knows exactly what he's doing. He draws up a great game plan for us every single day and every single game we come out and play.

We just try to work as hard as we possibly can and learn from our mistakes, but he drives us every day. It's a great quality he has, for sure.

Q. Landry, can you talk about playing in a big-time atmosphere like this as a freshman. You've got a lot of guys that played in some big ball games, your teammates, but talk about your flow and how you felt today out there.
LANDRY SHAMET: Yeah, it was just -- I think I kind of had my settling in process in the first game. Just getting adjusted to the different environment, playing here on the stage and the stakes. Today I felt pretty good.

I think I've been comfortable in situations like that before. Obviously, you can't recreate ones like a conference tournament, but I just felt comfortable, felt comfortable with my teammates, and we just went out and did what we had to do.

Q. Rashard and Conner, you've been through this week a lot now. What's it like? What do you try to do now? How maybe is it different from last year where there was some question about whether you were in?
RASHARD KELLY: Well, I'm going to start off and say we've got a championship trophy going back home to Wichita with us. So that's the difference. And this being our third time at this tournament, it kind of allows us to get off our feet for a little bit but also work on ourself and not have to be sleepless nights. We worked this hard to come this far every night. We just kind of controlled our own destiny tonight. I'm just proud of the guys.

CONNER FRANKAMP: Yeah, last year we had to stress a little bit about getting in the tournament, hoping that we would. It's different this year, obviously, since we got the championship and bringing it back home.

But we'll get right back to work and work hard and work on us and be prepared for when we get in the tournament.

Q. The question I asked of the players, is there a moment, Gregg, was it a period of time where you saw this team take off? And what do you think instigated the improvement in this team?
GREGG MARSHALL: Well, if you want to go back to the beginning of the year, we were trying to figure out our rotation, and we lost five seniors. I think 3 1/2 starters, if you will. Two guys that are playing in the NBA. We don't recruit five-star guys, at least we haven't gotten any. I'm not sure we've recruited any.

But it's hard. It's hard plugging in guys. So we postponed the international trip for a summer. So we went this past summer, and we gave up 80 points a game on the tour. We lost a game. I'd love to play that team again now, but we've improved exponentially since then.

If you saw us -- I know you run hot and cold on us depending on our performance. If you saw us then, you'd have really been down on us. We weren't very good. I knew that. Coaches knew that. I'm not sure the players knew that. Then we go into the season, and we're a little better because we really worked hard in the fall after the tour.

At that point, Daishon was the point guard, Conner was the two, and we didn't execute very well.

We couldn't score against Louisville. They played zone. They played 40 minutes of zone against us. I don't know why, but he's a very good coach, and obviously it was a very good game plan because we weren't very good against it. We had a shot in the air, down four in the last couple of minutes, and it went in and out, and we ended up losing by ten. We had a shot in the air to beat Michigan State, we didn't beat them. Then we lost to Oklahoma State. It was a poor performance, our only loss at home.

So we beat Oklahoma, beat LSU, win at Colorado State, beat Tulsa, beat St. Louis, South Dakota State -- pretty good teams. We thought it was a heck of a schedule. Turns out it wasn't a great schedule according to the RPI.

But the turning point, I think, if you had to pick one thing, would have been giving Landry Shamet the ball and him running the point. He's been really good. Conner's really come on, as you've written about. I think it's pretty clear he's playing with a different level of confidence and moxie and shooting the ball brilliantly.

Shaq Morris has been up and down throughout his career, and he's been playing some of his best basketball. So there's a couple other things to go along with Landry assuming the point. And I think Rashard Kelly, he's a guy that is a different player. He's a different player than he was earlier in the year. He's really playing with much -- he seems bigger. I know he's not bigger, but he seems bigger, more explosive, athletic, and he's really playing well. So there's three or four things.

Q. Gregg, what would this week be like for Dan Muller in terms of angst and hoping to get in? The Valley has a pregnant pause before Selection Sunday.
GREGG MARSHALL: Well, I mentioned on television, on CBS, and I mentioned to two of his seniors -- I saw Tony Wills and Paris Lee. I told him, I really hope you guys get in. I think you can win a couple of games in the tournament. I think you're a really good team, and you've had a great career.

I did not see Deontae Hawkins in the handshake line, or I would have told him the same thing. I told Dan Muller, you had a really good year. I'll be pulling for you.

You know, I really -- I've been doing that now -- this will be our sixth tournament in a row, and four of those, we got at-larges. We would have -- and of the four at-large, I think two of them we knew that we were in. We were just disappointed in our seeding.

And who knows what will happen this year? We may be a 10 still. Who knows? I think we can go deep in the tournament, and I think Illinois State is capable of winning a game or two. I really do. They didn't show it today, but I think they're a quality team.

Q. Also, he said in here that this team might -- your team right now might be better than the undefeated team, at least in some ways. Does he have a point?
GREGG MARSHALL: You know, again, we had an undefeated team, and we have a team that went to the Final Four. This team's comparable. It really is. We've got so many weapons defensively. We play hard, try to play smart.

My coaching staff does a great job. We've got some really, really bright minds breaking down the film and developing game plans. We're very deep. We're very deep, pretty big, athletic, skilled, and talented. It's a good formula. And they're fun to coach. They really are a lot of fun to coach.

I enjoy coaching them. They're great kids. They're great young people. They represent us very, very well.

Q. Congratulations, Coach. Illinois is the third producing -- third best producing NBA talent pool after New York and L.A. Just talk a little bit about what it takes to get kids from the IHSA and from the high schools in Illinois away from the home schools, like in ISU and Illinois and Northwestern, and just the difficulties, struggles, or even the successes, like a Fred VanVleet, that you've had.
GREGG MARSHALL: Yeah, I think Fred was -- I'm trying to think of the guys from Illinois that we've had. And I know Fred was obviously very talented, and somehow we snuck him out of there. But I don't know if we've had another Illinois player.

Q. Peyton Adams right now.
GREGG MARSHALL: Peyton Adams? Oh, Peyton Allen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He dropped out of school in the fall.

Yeah, we've got them from all over. We've got them from New Jersey, and we've got them from Kansas City, and we've got them from Oklahoma City. And we've got them from Madison, Wisconsin; Jacksonville, Florida. We don't let geography dictate our recruiting. We have a budget that, if we need to get on a plane -- I mean, we're recruiting guys on the West Coast now, which we haven't done. We're recruiting guys on the East Coast. We're recruiting guys from foreign countries. We just signed a young man from Denmark, and we've got another Wichitan that will be coming in next year.

So the thing that we do is we have to go look at them and appeal to them so that they'll get on a flight to come see us, and they fly over a lot of good universities and colleges and programs to get to us. Think about that.

Markis is from New Jersey. Darral is from Madison, Wisconsin. Daishon is from Jacksonville, Florida. Their response when they get to our campus is, wow, I knew it was nice, but I didn't think it was this nice.

We've already vetted the people we recruit. We want character kids. Guys that want to go to class. Guys that want to represent us in a first class way, want to work hard, want to be a part of something special, want to give of themselves for the whole. Pop said it best, Popovich from San Antonio Spurs. He said, we want guys in our program that are already over themselves.

And you see how we share the ball. We're balanced scoring. No one's scoring 20 points a game, but six years in a row, we've gone to the NCAA Tournament, and when we get there, we do damage.

Q. Coach, two real quick questions. One, I've noticed how hard -- you mentioned how hard your staff works. I noticed today that your team had a lot of toughness in them. They was after every 50-50 ball. Do you credit your staff with that. Also, real quickly, you had McDuffie last year, Landry this year, two young guys, and you got a young roster as well. Is that sort of the template that keeps you going and staying at Wichita State with the type of recruiting you can do and the type of staff that you got to keep your kids and yourself there at Wichita State?
GREGG MARSHALL: Without a doubt. We work very hard every day. None of our staff, other than I.B., Dick Brown played at Mississippi State -- excuse me, Texas A&M before transferring out. He's from Mississippi. So he had a little taste of power five basketball. The rest of us played at schools you've probably never heard of. So we're not silver spoon guys. We're grinders. And we just get in there, and we work hard.

I think it's exemplified by how hard our guys played. I mean, the players and teams take on the personality of their coaches, and all of our coaches, including me, the only way I got on the floor was if I out-competed the opposition. So I wasn't the biggest, strongest, fastest, quickest. I didn't jump very high, barely dunked the basketball at 6'2 1/2". But if you were going to beat me, it was going to take all day.

So we took on every challenge, and that's what our team does. You're right. We've got some really good young players. I think Austin Reaves and C.J. Keyser, both of our freshmen this year, are going to be great in the program. They just don't get an opportunity because they've got veterans in front of the them right now. But they're going to get better. They'll be better next year than they are this year. They'll get stronger. Skill development will take place, and we've got a couple of good ones coming. We don't lose anybody.

Q. Around halftime, word leaked out of Mizzou that Ken Henderson is going to be let go. Soon after that, everybody on the Internet was talking about Gregg Marshall, go get Gregg Marshall. Does that get old for you? Are you flattered? What are your thoughts of the people crying out for Gregg Marshall at Mizzou?
GREGG MARSHALL: Well, I'm flattered. It's very humbling to hear that, but -- and I don't know. I really don't have a crystal ball. I don't know how all that's going to play out. I could easily retire at Wichita State, if they will have me. My contract says I'll be there at least another seven years. But we don't stick our head in the sand either. That's just the way we've always done it.

The nice thing about having success and doing it the right way with quality young people is when you have opportunities, if you are -- if you want to listen -- and we do -- then we see how that goes. But right now we're in a great place. We're in a great place. It's a win-win.

My family's very happy in Wichita. At some point, I want to retire and have a beach house. We'll invite you down, kick it a little bit. But until then, I'm going to coach wherever they'll have me and try to do it the right way and win and do it with quality young people.

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