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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: DETROITMarch 15, 2018Jim BoeheimTyus BattleFrank HowardDetroit, Michigan THE MODERATOR: We're joined by Syracuse student-athletes Frank Howard and Tyus Battle. Questions for the student-athletes. Q. Frank, what can you say about the resolve of this team, and that no matter what's on the outside, on the inside you guys have been through a lot of adversity, playing six guys, five a lot of the time and just believing in one another knowing you've got to be 40-minute guys this season? FRANK HOWARD: It's been something we've enjoyed, understanding we're playing 40 minutes a night. Every day, you kind of start -- once you understand it's your job, you want to start enjoying it. So we enjoy it. It's a great time of the year, we're in a great spot. We're still playing with that chip on our shoulder, and we still have that identity as a team. TYUS BATTLE: Well, we just focus on our circle, our teammates and our coaching staff. That's what we're focusing with. And we don't try to listen to outside sources and stuff like that. We're just going on the court, we play, and we fight. Q. Frank, you were talking about playing 40 minutes. When you know you're going to be asked to do that physically, what do you change about your recovery or your stretching or anything, like all the other stuff that goes into that? FRANK HOWARD: Every day, you know, you've got to get your treatment in. Drink a lot of fluids. Have to change your diet a little bit. So you try to do anything that gives you energy, to refuel your body. We all want to, want basketball to be a job one day. So it helps you, treat it as a job early. TYUS BATTLE: Like Frank said, we spend a lot of time recovering, resting, sleeping. Our training staff does a great job helping us play this amount of minutes in a game. Q. What has this season has taught you about yourselves personally and about this group? TYUS BATTLE: It's the heart that we have in this team. That's what makes it special. We've been down multiple games, late in the games, but we always find a way to come back, fight and get wins, just like we saw the other night. So I think that's the main thing about this team. FRANK HOWARD: Yeah, that shows the character of each guy on this team and each guy on the coaching staff. Every day we understand we're playing basketball, you know what I mean? So we're going to give it all we have. Coach Boeheim has done a great job of building a culture around campus and stuff and around the gym. So every day we go hard and we're going to fight to that end. Q. Tyus, Coach Dixon said he's been watching you a long time back from recruiting days all the way, watching your career. He says he knows a lot about you and loves watching you play. But what do you know about TCU? What do either one of you know about TCU, your opponent? TYUS BATTLE: We know he's a really good coach, really good defensive coach, offensive coach. We've gone over stuff through scouting and stuff like that, so we'll be ready to play. FRANK HOWARD: TCU being a whole other conference, we didn't really get to see them much during the year, but we've done a lot of scouting. And I know Coach Dixon is a great coach. And I know I'm 0-3 against him. We're looking to get one tomorrow. And we know it will be a tough game. Q. Have you been able to use stuff in past teams in other places that they seem to do similarly that can help you out? FRANK HOWARD: I assume he might try to attack the zone the same way. But it's different personnel. When he was at Pitt he had some tall guys who were very versatile. So his team now, he has a great team. They still have a lot of guys who are versatile. But we're just going to look at the team they have now, look at this game, look at how they played this year and just go from there. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. Coach, an opening statement. COACH BOEHEIM: I'll just take questions. I'm ready for that. Q. What you can say about the heart of this team, the drive of them? The entire season, no matter what's happened, up and down, they haven't blamed each other for anything and they've stayed close? COACH BOEHEIM: We've never blamed anybody for anything in 42 years. So we're not going to start now. We go out. We do the best we can with what we have, and this team has played as hard as you could ask them to play. Every game they've competed. Because of the way our schedule ended upsetting up, everybody we played had -- in the way we are, everybody that we played this year had a legitimate chance to play with us or beat us, starting with Texas Southern and Iona and Buffalo and all the teams we played early. We had to maximize our effort in each one of those games to win. We've struggled at times offensively and at other times we've done some really good things offensively. But given the limitations and the numbers, I couldn't ask anything more from this group. Q. What do you think your team did well last night that you hope to carry over to tomorrow? COACH BOEHEIM: I think our defense was pretty good. We made some bad mistakes defensively. But Arizona is a high-scoring team. They average in the 80s and we held them to 56 points. I think our defense was good. I think offensively we struggled as we have for the most part this year. We hit a couple of stretches in the game where we played well. But it was, again, mainly our defense and rebounding were pretty good. Q. Do you see any similarities in this TCU team and Jamie's teams at Pitt? COACH BOEHEIM: I think this is a much better offensive team than most of the other teams he had at Pittsburgh. They were more defense. We got hurt more when we lost to Pittsburgh on the defensive end. We didn't really get much offense, have much offense success against his better teams. We lost some of those games in the 50s. We just couldn't score enough. But this team is a really, really good offensive team, I think much better than any that I can remember at Pittsburgh. This team has got multiple guys that can score and size and really good rebounding team. I think it's a much better offensive team than any of those teams were. Q. A lot of kids like giving back to their community. And over the years what have you seen, what community work that you guys have done? COACH BOEHEIM: Well, we're a rather small community. So our players have been tremendously active. We do multiple things every year. We do a dinner for the Make-A-Wish group that provides about eight to 10 wishes a year, which means in the neighborhood of we raise around $100,000 every year in a luncheon for ladies only. We do stuff through our foundation, our players are very active. We generally grant about 500 to $600,000 a year in the community to the Boys & Girls Club and any other organization that works with kids. Our players are very active in our foundation and our fundraisers. We do a lot of other things in the community. Those are the big things we do. But we do a lot of other things in the community and we work with soldiers at Fort Drum, 10th Mountain Brigade, which is the main fighting group that represents our country and about 14 different countries in the world and specifically mostly in Afghanistan. But the players are very active and have really helped us in all the things that we do in the community. And it's been good. We've raised a lot of money for Coaches Vs. Cancer. They've helped us with that. And really proud of our players being involved in the community. Q. I understand your daughter played a game yesterday is in the state finals? COACH BOEHEIM: Tomorrow. Q. So number one question is as a parent, what has it been like to take her on that journey? And number two, how do you keep an eye on that game, hopefully avoiding the time conflict? COACH BOEHEIM: I hope it's live streamed. They play at 6:15 tomorrow night. Hopefully it is. I was at her last game where they won the regional. And they won the last two state championships in their division. So they have three seniors who have played through, this will be their third try at winning the state championship. It's fun to watch them. You watch them in the summer with AAU, and of course my other son played in the state last year and played in the prep school championships this year. And my other son's a freshman at Cornell. So I got to watch a lot of extra games this year. I'm really happy that they're done with AAU basketball. Coaches complain that we have to go out for a month. I was out four months last summer -- April, May, June, July. And a couple in August. But it's fun watching them play. They like the game. They've always liked it. Their mother pushes them pretty hard. And I like to go watch them. She coaches them. Q. How do you handle such a quick turnaround with a group that's already shorthanded and having to play another game in 48 hours? COACH BOEHEIM: You know, it's tough. But if you're in this tournament, you play Friday night. You're going to play again Sunday. So you're going to play twice anyway. During the season we played quite a few -- not as many as we usually do, but we played a few back -- Sundays, Mondays and back-to-back games. And we had a lot of three games in six days, seven days. So we're prepared for that. But they'll be ready to play. Q. Earlier Coach Dixon talked about how you were very open with him early on when he got the Pitt job and developed a really good relationship. Can you talk and expand on that relationship that you have with him? COACH BOEHEIM: We were together a lot of years in the Big East and then the ACC. And I gave him too many hints that were good, because he beat us a lot. But I thought he did an unbelievable coaching job at Pittsburgh. Ben started it, Howland got it started. And when Jamie took over they did even better. And he's a really, really good basketball coach. And I just have a lot of respect. I was the chairman of the committee of the USA Basketball, and we had him coach one of our teams overseas. It was a really hard tournament. It was a really hard tournament. We had a team going to -- I'm not positive, I think it was Australia. But I did it for about 15 years. I had 15 different teams in 15 different years. But I think he coached that one. It was a really hard tournament. We didn't expect to win, and he won the tournament with the guys he had. It was definitely -- they were underdogs. But he's a great basketball coach. And he's done a great job obviously at TCU, and did a great job at Pittsburgh. We wouldn't be here if he was still at Pittsburgh. Q. As a basketball coach, even when you're in the tournament, do you watch other games in the tournament? COACH BOEHEIM: I watch every game. I watch every game all night, during the summer, during the season. I text Mark Few after every game he plays, what he should have been doing right and what he didn't right. I love basketball. When they're not on, I watch the NBA. When they're not on, I watch women's basketball. If they're not on, I watch curling if that's not on. I know more about curling than any basketball coach in the country. I can tell you that right now. I stay up late. I like to watch TV, and I like to watch sports on TV. Soccer is getting to be my favorite. My son and I have an argument, I think Messi is the best player; he thinks Ronaldo is the best player. But he's never right. He's just smarter than I am. I couldn't get into Cornell. Q. How is Bourama Sidibe's knee? COACH BOEHEIM: Same as he's felt all year, terrible. Q. Any indication how he's moving? COACH BOEHEIM: It's been bad for the whole year. I don't think it's going to change today or tomorrow. He's doing the best he can at it. He's got pain every time he plays. It's not going to hurt it anymore. But he needs to get it fixed. And as soon as we're done playing he'll get it fixed. And it's not a major thing, but he has constant pain. Every game, he can't jump. I don't know what happened at Pittsburgh, but he had one of those, something happened. I don't know what it was. But he felt good that one night, but that's been it. Q. Looking back with your time with David Patrick, is there any particular memory that stands out most? COACH BOEHEIM: Memory of who? Q. David Patrick, the with TCU. COACH BOEHEIM: David. I was thinking what's he talking about? I was thinking of David Padgett for a minute there. We recruited David. He came in, he was a good player but he came into Syracuse and we had, I don't know, like I forget -- I'm not going to try to name the player. We had a great point guard. So he really wasn't going to get a lot of time. And he transferred, which transfers are -- I mean, sometimes -- not all the time, but quite a bit of the time transfers, it's a good thing if you're stuck, and you get an opportunity to play someplace else, it's good for players to be able to do that. I think it will cause some issues when players are able to freely leave. But the more that I think about it, even though there will be some just crazy stuff happen. Some guy will just say, I'm going to play a lot here, but I'm going to play more over there, so I'm just going to go over there. Or Coach yells at me too much. I'm going to leave. There's going to be a lot of that. But on the other hand there's a lot of cases where you'll have a kid that just didn't fit in your program for whatever. And he can go over here and play and not have to sit out. So I've always been against it because I'm afraid of what will happen. But in the balance of everything, I think the players to have that freedom will end up being overall a good thing, even though it will cause some crazy stuff. We need to -- we really don't need to do as much as people think about our game, but we need to do more for the players. I've never -- I love Charles Barkley -- I've never really been a fan of some of the crazy things he said. But today he probably made about the best case of anybody I've heard today on television about what we should do. I don't know who told him to say those things, because I know Charles didn't figure it out himself, but somebody did. And he had some great observations about paying players and what the deal is. And I think sometimes we forget there are 4500 players playing college basketball -- 4500. And I was one of the 4450 that was very happy to have a scholarship and play college basketball. There's 50 guys that probably could get some more than they get in college, but those 50 guys, most of them end up making $100 million. So they end up all right. But the rest of us, college basketball is a pretty good thing for us. And we have made changes and we have helped the players in ways that have, I think, been very good. And I'm hopeful that this commission finds some other way to enhance players' experiences -- I mean, parents to games, parents travel, hotels for the tournament or even for a game in the regular season or two. And whatever else they can do to enhance the experience for players. If you sold T-shirts, one of our players, if they got about 5,000 bucks for one guy. That's about what it would be. It's not like it would be 100,000. I'm not saying some guys wouldn't get $100,000 someplace, but that's -- let's just do some more the players if we can. Let them talk, get advice from agents who are going to tell them to leave anyway, but that's all right, let them get it. Let them talk to them, see what happens down the road. There's so much made out of one-and-done. I've even said it. It's like if next year there was one-and-done-- let's think of this year's freshman class. Who would have come out? Who would have come out this year? Who would not have gone to the NBA? Trae Young? He hardly played on the U.S.A. Team last summer. He's going to be a top-10 pick. Why? Why is he going to be a top-10 pick? Only one reason is, because he came to college. If he had come out last year he would have been a late first-round maybe, and he would have played the whole year in the D-League. Now he's going to be a top-10 pick and get a lot of money and play. Who really would have come out? I think maybe, I'm not going to start naming all kinds of names, but I think a couple of guys, two or three. And so more might come out and they'd all be playing in the D-League for two or three years, like a lot of guys that come out early now. So let them go. Let those guys go. And, I mean, just look at Trae Young, for example. He can be playing in Idaho someplace this year riding the bus. This whole thing about, oh, yeah, let's get them in the G League. Have you ever been to the G League? Have you gone to a G League game? You ever lived where those guys live? They're adults -- 23-, 24-year-old guys. Now you're going to be 17-year-old guys there? You've got to be crazy. The other thing is there's 17 guys on every NBA team. Do people realize that? Do you realize that? There's 17 guys on the teams. So if you're not a superstar coming out of college, the Bagleys and those guys, where do you think, you're -- how do you think you're going to get to the NBA? The guys up there at 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, they're you with three or four years already in. And those guys up there in the league, they're not going anywhere. There's not many places up there. More and more people will start to understand that as we move forward. Sure, you can have a G League team, you've got 12 guys there. And you've got 17 on the -- or 15 plus the two guys with two-ways. So where are those guys going? And so instead of paying them 30, what are you going to pay them, 100, 75, 100? By summer they will not have a penny. It's just not a good plan. We need to fix the college experience as much as we can. Obviously some things went wrong; we know that. Let's try to fix it. It's still the best way -- if I have a son, I want him to go to college. Even if he's a great player. Go to college for a year or two. It does not hurt you to go to college, whether it's one year or two years. It does not hurt you. It only helps you. That's enough of that. Goodbye. Q. Want to go look up the end of the Loyola game? Loyola beat Miami (indiscernible) -- COACH BOEHEIM: I'm not shocked. Miami struggled a little bit without Bruce Brown. He's their guy. He's a great leader, great guy. And Loyola had a great year. I mean, there's going to be upsets in this tournament. I really thought the Penn game would be closer. They didn't shoot it quite as well as they can. But Gonzaga is really good this year. And we played Greensboro last year, those same guys, they're really good. They had a really good team. It's college basketball. There's nothing wrong with the game. The game is good. We've got a lot of good teams. There's a lot of good players and a lot of teams and it makes for I think great regular seasons, because you see great games. And we weren't great this year but people that came to our games they saw great games. Not only saw the league games but the other teams we played that came in were really good. And the game's in great position because there's a lot of really good players. There's a lot of really good coaches and the game will be fine. It's a great game and we just gotta do some things and get things -- make some changes, do some things that I think can be done, can help the game. We'll see what happens going ahead. Thank you. THE MODERATOR: Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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