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NCAA MEN'S FIRST FOUR: DAYTON

March 14, 2017

Dayton, Ohio

THE MODERATOR: We're joined by athletes from North Carolina Central, Dajuan Graf and Patrick Cole. Questions for the student-athletes.

Q. Pat and Dajuan, now that you're here, you guys are here in Dayton, what's going through your mind, what's your thought process? You're actually here and seeing the floor and the game is less than 24 hours away.
DAJUAN GRAF: It's just an honor to be here in Dayton. It's just a blessing to be playing in the tournament again. We're just trying to get focused, to get ready for the game tomorrow.

PATRICK COLE: For this being my first time and a lot of my teammates' first time, the experience from leaving school to getting on a plane to getting off the plane just was just tremendous.

It just had me thinking about how there's a lot of student-athletes out there that didn't get this opportunity through four years of their college experience. And I'm blessed to be one of them. And my teammates are as well.

This experience has been great so far. But I try to reiterate to them guys that we're not here just to participate, we're here to win a basketball game. And that starts tomorrow. So you know we're kind of getting focused and getting ready for a great opponent tomorrow in UC Davis.

Q. You mentioned UC Davis. Obviously it's a quick turnaround. What do you know about the Aggies, and what are you looking forward to about matching up against them tomorrow night?
DAJUAN GRAF: We know they're a very aggressive team. They like to get in the paint. They like to get fouls. We know how they play defense. We know they play the same kind of defense we play, pack line defense. We know we've got to be prepared coming out.

They're going to play hard. They're going to play aggressive. This is a tournament game. Nobody wants to go home. We just got to play aggressive and want to win it more.

PATRICK COLE: We know that they're aggressive. You know, they kind of want to get in your defensively, pressure on the ball. We know that at this time and point no one wants to go home. You don't want to stop playing basketball at this time.

You want to kind of keep playing as long as you could. So we know they're going to come out with some fire, a different kind of fire. And we're going to stay on each other by having that same fire, not wanting to go home and wanting to continue to play in this tremendous tournament.

Q. When you guys clinched the regular season you cut down the nets, and you know what happened next, the next two games. How do you make sure that the team that was in Norfolk that dominating the conference tournament makes its way to Dayton and not the same team that had the layover against Savannah State in the regular season?
PATRICK COLE: Like I said, reiterating to the guys that what got us through Norfolk was defense. Defense won us that championship. And that we have to stay focused and locked in on the defensive end of the floor. I said we kind of lost focus on that, and what has got us in a 13-game winning streak was defense. We were holding teams to under 60, to 50 points, shooting about 30 percent from the field.

We kind of got away from that playing Savannah and North Carolina A&T. We just want to stay locked in mostly on the defensive end of the floor.

DAJUAN GRAF: Like Pat said, we just know we've got to focus on defense the most. Defense definitely wins championships, as you can see. Both teams won their conference tournament. We know both teams are pretty good defensive teams. We want to stay focused on our defense and stay locked in on the game plan.

Q. With those two games, three games in Norfolk, was that the best ball you guys have played all season, in your opinions?
DAJUAN GRAF: I think it was probably the best defensive games we had all season. I think we played good defense all year, but we just knew going into the conference tournament we were going to have to lock up and give everybody our best shot on defense. And that was about it, really. We just wanted to play good basketball and play as a team and win that conference.

PATRICK COLE: Yeah, Coach told us after we lost to A&T, he said, look, now you lose again that's it. There won't be no more fighting for a NCAA Tournament bid. You will have a postseason berth, but it won't be, you know, the dream that all you had since you were younger watching other teams play in the NCAA Tournament.

So we went into Norfolk with a mindset, hey, we're doing this for each other in the locker room for our fans and for everybody that believe in us. We need to start believing in ourselves and we kind of got away from that. But we're back to it. We know those two losses kind of hurt us a lot moving forward into this tournament. But I feel like we're already and, we'll be ready tomorrow night.

Q. Dajuan, does the experience from a couple of years ago help now?
DAJUAN GRAF: I think it plays a big part for me because I can tell these guys what to expect and how to handle certain situations, just being prepared for everything that comes at you. It all comes kind of fast and it's a blur in these last couple of days, but I'm trying to get my guys focused and ready to play on Wednesday.

Q. Dajuan, I think I saw you tweet you felt like you hadn't slept in a couple of days after you got back from Norfolk. Is that what you mean? It's a blur and getting phone calls and all that?
DAJUAN GRAF: Yeah, a lot of family members been calling me, friends been calling me, trying to talk to everybody just seeing how it's going, and they're congratulating me for the win.

But I was trying to tell them we've still got more work to do. We've still got a game Wednesday and hopefully we have a game Friday. So I really haven't slept that much in the last couple of days, but last night I got a little bit more sleep.

Q. Because of what happened against Savannah State, and I hate keeping keep bringing it up, is that a lesson you and you'll need it to bring it here after winning another championship?
PATRICK COLE: Anytime you lose you have to look at it as a learning experience, especially losing when you know that you were supposed to win and that you had a chance to win. There's some things we could have did differently. But, hey, man, hats off to those guys that beat us. They came out more hungrier than us.

And on any given night, this is basketball, no matter what school anyone goes to, you can be beat. And we just went into the games with the wrong mindset. We didn't go in, you know, 13-win streak team. We went in there kind of sleeping on those guys, kind of just trying to get through the day, get through the game.

And it hurt us. And we did learn from that. So we're going to move forward and not going to sleep on UC Davis as we get prepared for them. We know they won their conference tournament. So we're going to be ready.

DAJUAN GRAF: Yeah, I just think that everything happens for a reason. In those two losses, we definitely learned a hard lesson from that. And Coach told us going into those games, like, don't sleep on these guys. They're very good teams, dangerous teams. And we happened to sleep on them. We got two losses from that.

But after that I think we just learned our lesson. We had a hard lesson we had to learn. And we just started getting our focus back, went back to the fundamentals, basic principles we've been doing all year and that kind of helped us in the conference tournament. So we wanted to use that momentum to come into the NCAA Tournament today and tomorrow.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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