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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: DALLASMarch 14, 2018Scott NagyMark HughesLoudon LoveGrant BenzingerDallas, Texas Q. This is for Grant and Loudon. Could you guys talk and explain what Ryan Custer's presence and his injury has kind of meant to the team this year, and I know he was present there when you guys won the automatic bid, but what's it been like having him around the team this year? LOUDON LOVE: It's something special for sure, and now we've been able to get him on the road with us. It's a different aspect being able to have him at our side all the time, and we have shirts with it on them. Some of the guys got tattoos for him. He is the heart of this team. He's got the hard job of us all waking us up every day, pushing through some obstacles that some of us have never faced. It's good to know that he's there with us and that we can play for him. GRANT BENZINGER: Yeah. We're super thankful that him and his family were able to come out here with us. We were so happy he was there with us at Motor City Madness. And for him to be on the court with us to celebrate was a special moment. Q. Loudon, can you explain why you changed your name and what was involved? I just wonder if your family was excited about your changing it. LOUDON LOVE: Yeah. It's my mom's maiden name. My parents were divorced, and I didn't see my dad for a very long time, and my grandpa helped my mom and I for a long time after her divorce, so I'm kind of paying tribute to him and my mom for all the hard work they put in. Q. Loudon, your journey has been pretty interesting to get to this point. You were a football player. What was the decision? I know you had an injury. How much did that play a part in going the basketball route for you? LOUDON LOVE: Not a huge part. Basketball has always where my heart was at, and Coach Nagy being able to keep his recruitment after the injury made a big part in staying with him, as well, after he transferred to Wright State. The coaching staff there is just something special. Q. When did Coach Nagy plant the seed that, hey, you could be a championship team or you could get to -- did that start right when you came or this year or when? GRANT BENZINGER: He planted the seed in the summer. He saw the pieces we had. He knew what was coming back, and he planted us then. But we started out with three. Some of us didn't really believe, and then I would say around the Georgia Tech game when we beat them, we really bought in. And ever since then, it's been a completely different team, different mindset, different attitude, and that was the turning point for us. MARK HUGHES: Definitely I would say he's always believed in us. And we really at the beginning of the season like Grant said, we didn't believe it, but around Georgia Tech when we got that huge win, we thought, we could do this, why not us. Ever since then, we've just been playing with unbelievable confidence and taking with one game at a time, and really we just picked up some big wins. And now we know this shouldn't be just a once in 11 years thing, why not every year, like Coach Nagy has been saying. LOUDON LOVE: Yeah. Like the guys said, starting 0-3, be close game, Loyola here in this tournament and overtime loss to Miami of Ohio. So there were close games. Nothing to hang your head about too much, but we still believed then, and like they all said, the Georgia Tech game was probably a good turnaround for us after one of our worst losses all year at Missouri State. Q. Mark, Tennessee apparently kind of turned its season around this year by really stressing physical defense and being really tough guarding people, that sort of stuff. What have you seen from looking at them? How do you guys counter that, and have you gone up against teams that have had that similar kind of philosophy this year? MARK HUGHES: I feel like we haven't seen a team this physical. Coach Nagy been stressing that, just the pure physicality of the game is going to be so much different, not to be reactive because they're a much bigger team, and we don't want them to throw the first punch. We've got to come out and attack them, so just being more physical is a big key for us winning the game. Q. A little bit of a curve ball for all three of you, but I'd like to hear your thoughts if possible on gun control in light of all the gun violence we've seen here recently. LOUDON LOVE: You know, I haven't been too in touch with it other than the major happenings and issues, and I think it plays a part with us because we're on a university campus, as well. Just the safety of everyone is a big issue. I don't know. MARK HUGHES: Like personally, I feel like something needs to be done just because it's been happening so frequently. Again, I'm not too familiar with everything that's going on, but I feel like with recurrences like this, something needs to be done because obviously like people aren't safe, and it's not working how it is now. GRANT BENZINGER: No comment on that one. Q. Grant and Loudon, if you guys could talk about Admiral Schofield and Grant Williams, what you've seen on film and just your thoughts, if you've played against similar players to this, maybe the Georgia Tech game? GRANT BENZINGER: For Admiral, we've got a guy here that was first-team all-defense. He'll probably be matched up with him. And then Grant, it'll be Louden Love and Parker Ernsthausen and just splitting time with him. We have a plan. They're two really good players. Grant Williams, SEC Player of the Year, a lot of respect for them, the way they play. They play the game the right way, and we're going to have a lot of fun competing against them and hope to be the better team that day. LOUDON LOVE: Like Grant said, they're tough offensively and defensively. Definitely respect their games inside and out. Just physical guys all over, and we've got to be able to outwork them from the jump and be able to go throw the first punch, like Mark said, from the jump. Q. Mark, having looked at film of Admiral, have you seen a player quite like him, and how would you assess him as a player? MARK HUGHES: I wouldn't say I've seen a player like him just because of physically how he's built, 6'5", 240, so he's got me by about 50 pounds. But yeah, he's a good player. He's very physical, a good shooter, really just all-around good game. I haven't really guarded anybody in the post, like he's probably going to post-up, so something I've got to work on, and no, he's a good player, though, for sure. Q. Grant, as someone who was on that team that went 3-13 in conference, what does it mean for you now to be here with a shot to pull a huge upset in the tournament? GRANT BENZINGER: It's huge. My freshman year was a disaster, just so many injuries, not great attitudes on the team, and to have a complete turnaround from freshman to senior year, it really sends me off on a great note, on a high note. And you know, I wouldn't take back that freshman year for anybody anything. It taught me a lot about leadership and work ethic and what it takes to be on a good team and lead a good team. I'm glad it happened. It wasn't an easy year, wasn't a fun year. That off-season was absolute chaos and no fun, but to get to where we are now, definitely a blessing it happened. SCOTT NAGY: Well, I think we've obviously not had any players that have experienced this, and so things like this, the attention, the travel, just so many of the things that go along with the NCAA Tournament, they're so much fun. Can be overwhelming. And so people have asked me, you've been there before, how do you help these kids get through that. And my answer is, I really don't know because I've been there before three times and we've not won the game. It's not like I had the answer to help them get through that. Obviously there are some things I can talk to them about that I've experienced, and so we've done that. But obviously super proud of our kids and what they've done this year, and probably a little bit ahead of schedule of what we thought could happen, but they've been one of the most enjoyable groups I've ever worked with. Q. Scott, can you kind of go back and review when Ryan Custer got hurt, what your reaction was, and what he's meant to the team this season, and particularly now that he's been able to travel with you guys? SCOTT NAGY: You know, when it happened last April, it set our team back probably about a month. It really hit us hard. Obviously it hit Ryan and his family the hardest. But he was such a good teammate and is such a good teammate, but to not have him around every day and to have to watch him go through and his family go through what they've gone through was incredibly difficult for all of us. You know, we're just so proud of him. It's a great story, and everybody wants to talk about it. I wish it was a story we didn't have to talk about, but Ryan has handled it so incredibly well. His family has handled it well. Yesterday when we got on the ground, we sat on the plane for a while because we couldn't get Ryan off, and so -- and I think his family started to get a little uptight because they were affecting the schedule. And then we got to the bus, and the bus couldn't get him on, and we sat there for half an hour, and so things were pushed back, and they were starting to get upset. And I just went back, and I said, look, if everything was screwed up because Ryan was with us, we would rather have Ryan with us. If we have to miss practice, it doesn't matter. We would rather have everything go wrong because we have Ryan with us than everything go perfectly and not have you here. And so we're thrilled to have you here. I want you guys to relax and just know that we're happy to have you here. He's meant so much to our team. Obviously we talk to our team a lot about courage. And a lot of times, it takes one person to show great courage, and it kind of bolsters everybody else's courage, and Ryan has been that for us for sure. Q. What kind of bolstered you going back to South Dakota State when you had several rough years as you became a D-I program? You had 5, 6 years, and what, it's just -- you could foresee this coming or you had had success before? What was it like going through that and now? SCOTT NAGY: When we made a transition, it was -- we had won 80 percent of our games at the division two level. In terms of percentages, I was one of the top coaches in the country. It was almost easy. And when we made the transition, that obviously became very difficult. We had no league. We had five years, obviously, to wait until we were eligible for anything, but even if you don't have a league, it's pretty difficult to have anything good happen to you. So we were traveling all over the country trying to play people. We couldn't keep players. We'd have one them or two years and they'd transfer. And in terms of coaching, it was obviously the hardest time of my life and really made me -- it made me a much better coach because when winning was so easy, I didn't have to do as much. We just had better players. I all of a sudden had to start coaching because we were playing people that had better players than us, and I had to figure out how to be better at strategy, the X's and O's part of the game, and so it helped me there. It probably helped me personally because I had started to just identify myself with just winning all the time, and all of a sudden I wasn't, and I felt like a loser. And one of the things I always told our players is whether you win or lose doesn't say anything about who you are, and it was easy for me to say that, but I didn't feel that way. And so I had to readjust some things in my own life, so it was good for me that way. And I was thankful we got a new AD during that time. It would have been very easy for him to get rid of me. Most coaches don't make it through a division two to division one transition, but he knew enough basketball that he knew I could coach, and we just needed the time, and he gave us the resources that we needed. And we slowly did it. We won 6 games, 8 games, 10 games, 14, 19. We just slowly built it and got the kind of players that we needed. Q. Just wondering if Admiral Schofield, how unique of a player he is and what you've seen from him recently on film and how you plan to deal with him. SCOTT NAGY: You know, we have a player in our league, in the Horizon League in Khalil Small that's built like him, but he's 6'2", not 6'5". Now, Khalil don't post like Admiral does. If you put a smaller person on him, he's going to beat him up, and he's a tremendous offensive rebounder. If you put a bigger person on him, he can step out and shoot it and drive him. He does become a problem. You need an excellent defender on him. You need a tough person that can block him out and guard him when he puts the ball on the floor. And clearly even in the SEC with the bodies they have, people have struggled to deal with him. He does present all kinds of problems without question. Q. Following up on that, the combination of him as he's been playing lately obviously what Grant Williams does for them, you don't see too many teams that have a guy like that around center anymore. How unique is that sort of approach? SCOTT NAGY: It's very unique, and generally when you talk about teams being physical, you think of the defensive aspect, that they just beat you up physically on the defensive end. But they beat you up physically on the offensive end. And if you don't move before they move, then it's over. If they get their body on you and they're the first to move, they're the first to create contact, then it's a problem, and they have -- you know, it's not only Williams and Schofield, they've taught all of their threes, fours and fives how to do that. Coach Barnes is -- and I've never played one of his teams, but having a chance to watch film on his team, he's done an incredible job, and they -- not only in putting a team together and just all of the motivational aspects that go with it, but their X's and O's and their technique and how he coaches those guys, I know is not very easy to get most people to do, and he's done it. He's done a great job. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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