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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: NASHVILLEMarch 15, 2018Ron HunterNashville, Tennessee RON HUNTER: We're glad to be back in the NCAA tournament. I know our guys are really excited. I just was asked a question a few minutes ago that I'm embarrassed I couldn't answer. I'm going to ask my players in five minutes. They told me if I could name three country singers, and I couldn't name one. So I'm going to ask my guys, if they want to play, they've got to give me three country singers that since we're in Nashville, we're going to have dinner downtown and they've got to give me the right answer or give me three. At least give me one. I didn't even have one. We love Nashville. It's really nice. I was here my first NCAA tournament when I brought IUPUI in here and we lost to Kentucky. And so it was terrific then. Hopefully, we'll have a different outcome. We're excited to be here. Q. I saw a tweet from y'all's basketball program that the stool was coming along to Nashville with you from a few years ago. Is it just a good luck charm? Will it be in the locker room? What are y'all planning to do with it? RON HUNTER: That's a surprise. No, it's more of a good luck thing that we wanted to bring. I didn't want to bring it but everybody else wanted to bring it. It was good luck for everyone but me. I had a torn Achilles. I was the one in pain with all that. But we actually kept it in a private place at school and we decided let's just bring it to Nashville like we did Jacksonville and, hopefully, we'll get the same success. Q. Earlier this week, you made a comment about Hyatts and Comfort Inns, et cetera. Were you being literal with that comment? What message were you trying to get across? RON HUNTER: Honestly, no, I was not being literal. We're not staying in a Comfort Inn, but, again, I think that sometimes what happens is that you get to the tournament and coaches get so intense about it. We're here to have fun. This is a great time of year. Now, I do believe that they're staying in a better hotel so I wanted to let our guys know that they're eating better. I used the Wendy's reference because when we were driving back after Sunday, when we found out who we were playing, we stopped at Wendy's and had a meal. While we were at Wendy's, I said, Trust me, Cincinnati is not eating at Wendy's. They're at Ruth's Chris. For you to eat at Ruth's Chris, we've got to beat a team like that. That's where the reference came from. Everybody knows I got a great deal of respect for Cincinnati and what they've been doing. Mick and I have been friends for a long time. I haven't spoken to Mick for a while because Mick wanted to recruit my son. My son wanted to go to Cincinnati. So I had to hate Mick in my household until R.J. actually committed to me. He actually liked Mick for some reason. He came home one day and said he was going to play at Cincinnati, and that changed my entire life. Q. Ron, the best coaches at this time of year are mentioned for other jobs every year. You've been mentioned for other jobs, the list of candidates, the last probably three years. Have you changed your strategy of how you handle that? Because you get the question every year. How do you handle that when you're asked about other jobs? RON HUNTER: Here's what I think about other jobs. Before we left to go to the conference tournament, my wife said, Hey, when you get back, I got a job for you. I need you to paint the basement. I wanted to win so bad so I haven't had to paint the basement. So what I do is I avoid those type of things. I avoid it with my wife. What I did is while we came back from the conference tournament with the championship, I called a friend to see if he would paint my basement. So that's what I do with jobs. I try to avoid these type of deals. Listen, I love where I'm at, man. At my age, I've said it before, I'll keep saying it again. I'm more about being happy. The other stuff, when I was 27, 30, 35, it was great to see, boy, I want to coach X and do this. You know what I want to do now? I want to be happy. More importantly, you know what I want to do? I want to win. I love winning. You can have all the money in the world. Winning, I love winning. I'm at a great place. I'm at a great institution. I work for great people. My mother would always say, Don't mess with happiness. You start messing with happiness, I don't care how much money you make, you start messing with happiness. I learned that through Homer Drew. You look at great mid-major coaches who stayed at places and enjoyed their stay. That's where I'm at. I'm at a great place. For me up to just leave that, it would have to be something like really, really special. Or my wife actually makes me paint, I may have to do something. Q. Hey, Ron, not many 15 seeds can say, hey, we got a great draw in the tournament. I'm sure you're not going to say that now. Looking at Cincinnati, do you think, you know, this is one of those teams we might have a shot against? RON HUNTER: Mark, you know I'm going to say this. I don't care who we play, I believe we have a shot. I don't believe in seedings. That's coach speak. People say we don't like our seeding. We're happy to be here. As I said before, the NCAA tournament is getting to the point where there won't be any mid-majors. We're just happy to be here. Cincinnati is a great team. For me, I didn't know -- when we played Baylor, I wasn't worried about the seeding or who we played. My kids play with a chip on their shoulder. I coach that way. I feel like every time I coach, I've got something to prove. Again, as much as I respect and I love Mick, I feel like I got something to prove because he's coaching at Cincinnati. If it was Mike Krczyckewskiski at Duke, I would feel the same way. I make sure our kids understand that and that's part of the comment about the hotel. When you're a mid-major, we don't get some of those things. Those kids weren't recruited by Mick. They weren't recruited by the ACC. This is a stage you can prove that. This is a stage for Coach Hunter to prove that he can coach against the best coaches. I told them this morning, if you're really good I'll see how good you are Friday at 2:00. I said it differently to R.J. I said, I don't think you can play with these guys. I think this is a tough level for you. He got so mad at me, he won a game and said, Dad, I'm going pro, now what? That kind of backfired a little bit on me. The seeding, we never talk about it. I could care less about the seeding. All we want to do is play. Man, I can't wait. Even the guys, they walked in, they had the stuff in the locker room. They were like kids in a candy store. They were excited. They're glad to be here. That's how I want the kids to play. We don't lock 'em up in the rooms. We're going to enjoy this. We're going to find out who country music stars are. We're going to enjoy Nashville. When I was in the NCAA tournament, we won three times. I don't remember it. Our coaches locked us in. I couldn't tell the guys what it was like as a player, because I stayed in the hotel, played the game. That's all I did. I want my players, when they're my age, they're saying when we were in Jacksonville, in Nashville, we did this. We're going to be loose, we're going to be fun. I still don't know any country artists in the world. He gave me one, the Garth Brooks guy, right? I do know one, Garth Brooks. My first answer was Luther Vandross. I thought he was country. I was wrong. I want my guys to have fun. We're going to enjoy. More importantly, at 2:00, you're going to see a group that's going to play hard and is going to believe they can win the game. Q. You have a personality and a perspective unlike any other coach in college basketball. Give us a little insight of where that comes from. RON HUNTER: I'll be honest with you, I don't know. It's just who I am. One of the things -- when I wake up and enjoy life, it's about the whole job thing. When I wake up, I don't have a lot of bad days. I don't like losing. I'll be honest with you at that. Again, my mom has always raised me that the blessings that you get, enjoy them. I didn't have to wake up this morning. I didn't have to be in the NCAA tournament. But not so much for me; I don't make this about me. I want the people around me to feel the same way. I want my players to feel like that. So, again, I enjoy it, man. I think this is great. I think that college basketball has taken a big hit this year in our image in that regard. What frustrates me about that is we spend a lot of time talking about what happens in the top five percent. NCAA basketball in Division I is about us, the mid-majors. There are more mid-majors than high majors. We always talk about the one and done. We get so much media attention about one and dones, and that's about 30 kids a year. What about the other 5,000 kids that play, that really enjoy it? I was one of those 5,000 that played. I played with a guy named Ron Harper. He was a great player. Played professional. The rest of us did okay. Ron made a lot of money and didn't give me one dime, but that's okay. Still, it's about just enjoying this. That's what I want to make sure it's not just about me. I want to make sure our kids enjoy it. That the people at Georgia State, we all enjoy this. It's not just about the coach or one player, but it's about all of us. Q. One of the hallmarks of UC is its defense. They come in with high rankings, blocks, perimeter defense. How do you prepare your team to face a team with such strong defense? RON HUNTER: I'm going to tell you what I told my guys last night. Cincinnati is good. We don't have a chance. They're good. They're defense. Look at their numbers. You only shoot 27 percent from the 3-point line. They're physical, they're well coached. They have no flaws. Honestly, they don't. They're a good basketball team. If they beat us, they're a team that can advance. At the end of the day, I don't want to tell my guys how good somebody else is. We talk about us. We do very little worrying about the other team. If we do what we're capable of doing and we do it at a high rate and you beat us, so be it. The thing is we're going to be prepared. I don't spend a lot of time talking about the other team. I could care less about the other team, to be honest with you. I respect them, I respect the university, I respect their coaches. At the end of the day, I'm more concerned what D'Marcus does, I'm more concerned that Devin makes shots, that Jeff Thomas make shots. If those guys make shots and we have a good defense too. If you look at what we're doing, I know it's unconventional, we got good defense too. They're the second ranked defense in the country. Let's see how good our defense is. That's what we're talking about. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what other people do. My job is to make sure we're doing what we're supposed to do and be as best as we can on that particular day. Q. Coach, I know you made it, but how concerned are you with the number of mid-major schools making the tournament of late? RON HUNTER: Very concerned. I really am. I think the funny thing about the NCAA tournament, what's made it are the upsets, VCU getting to the Final Four. What Butler has done. We kind of forget about that type of thing. I think it's terrible. I think at the end of the day, when you look at the number at larges that have been given to mid-majors, there's one thing that -- I'm not an analytical guy. I know they use analytics and they use the RPI. One thing we've taken out of the room is common sense. Common sense has been taken out. Middle Tennessee should have been in this tournament, period. I think that's the problem. This is a power five tournament. We understand that. I prepare -- the way I coach now, I coach completely different than I did ten years ago. I coach my guys to get ready for three days in March. And it's too bad because when I was a player, conference championships were something that was really important. I'll be honest, mid-majors, no, it's not. What's really important is getting the kids to the NCAA tournament. We don't even talk about for the most part winning a conference championship. What you want to win is those three days in March because, again, I've been 17-1 in the conference before and we had three bad minutes all year, and we couldn't get to the NCAA tournament. There are power fives that can go 8-10 in their league and still get in. I think it's completely unfair. It's not apples and apples and oranges, the RPI and what's fair. For example, how is it fair if Middle Tennessee can't take a private plane home, and they've got to stay all night because they got to get back to another game, where that school in the ACC, they can get back home the next day and get on a plane so now they're well rested. Things like that, we don't think about and don't talk about. That's a huge advantage for a power five team that mid-majors can't do. We get in a room and we're judged by it, just like when it talks about scheduling. At the end of the day, nobody is calling Georgia State and Middle Tennessee to play at our places. I just think that the system is wrong. I've said it before. I'm on a number of committees, the ADs and presidents have heard me say it. It's wrong. Again, that's the life we live in. That's what every mid-major coach has to understand. Q. Coach, your thoughts on your roster comprised mostly of kids that are from the Atlanta area and this being the only team from Georgia making it to the NCAA tournament this year. Talk about the talent pool that is in the state of Georgia and how you do so well in getting those kids to believe in what you do downtown Atlanta. RON HUNTER: That's one of the things I love. I love the fact that we're in the tournament. I also love the fact that our kids are from Atlanta and from Georgia. When I first took the job, it was interesting that people said that we couldn't recruit -- Georgia kids or Atlanta kids wouldn't come to Georgia State. Now, 11 of our 13 guys are from the state of Georgia or Atlanta. So I think when you're in an urban institution and do not recruit local kids, it makes no sense. Absolutely no sense at all. We did the same thing in IUPUI. When I was at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, we did the same thing. If you're in an you are an institution and can't recruit the kids in that city, that's a problem. It makes it fun that our guys all played against each other in high school. It makes it fun for the fans, for the media because they're kids that they know and I think that's really important. Now, can I ask you guys a question? Can you get me two more country stars that I can talk to my guys about? I'm embarrassed to tell my players I only know -- it's Garth Brooks, right? Garth Brooks is one. If somebody can send me two names, I could appreciate it. You got one? Who? Q. Keith Urban. RON HUNTER: Keith Urban. I got two of them. Q. Tim McGraw. RON HUNTER: I thought he was a pitcher. THE MODERATOR: His dad was a pitcher. RON HUNTER: I knew McGraw pitched somewhere. That's three. I'm going to talk to my guys. I guarantee they won't know those two names. If it's not Tupac, guarantee my guys don't know. Carrie Underwood, I thought she was American Idol? I knew that. Appreciate it. God bless everyone. Enjoy the tournament. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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