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NCAA MEN'S 1ST AND 2ND ROUNDS: JACKSONVILLEMarch 21, 2019Rick ByrdDylan WindlerKevin McClainJacksonville, Florida Maryland - 79, Belmont - 77 THE MODERATOR: Coach, if you could, just start us off with some comments about this basketball game. Turned out to be a fantastic game, just went the wrong way for you guys. RICK BYRD: Thank you. Once again, a lot of credit to Maryland. They made big plays, big winning plays at the end. I think it's pretty easy to define where we went wrong, and that was coming out to start the second half and just letting them run loose on us and go from a deficit to a significant margin. Now, we're really proud of our guys the way they fought back. You know, if you're any good, you make a tournament. Unless you win the tournament, you lose your last game. So totally proud of this team, particularly these two seniors, for the career they've had, for the season our team has had, and except for one little deflection, I think we'd be playing Saturday afternoon. Q. Dylan, totally different game than what you played in Dayton; just talk about your approach and being more of a scoring weapon in this game and what it was you did to be able to give them so much trouble. DYLAN WINDLER: I wouldn't say I came into this game with any different approach. I'm always coming into the game with the approach I'm trying to score and do whatever I can for my team, and tonight I happened to be scoring. So I got hot early and just continued to stay aggressive and attack and got to the line a little bit, saw a few shots go and just stayed aggressive. Q. Rick, you had said that you didn't want to be embarrassed; I'm sure you're not embarrassed. Just talk about how your team performed on this type of stage. RICK BYRD: Yeah, I guess what I mean by that is any time you're playing a team, a Big Ten team, a team at this level, you're worried. You're worried about the difference in athleticism and you're worried about whether you can score, you're worried about whether you can stop them from scoring, and we had good reason to worry if we could get the rebound when they didn't score tonight, and there's just so many ways that they get extra points that we can't get. I'm sort of, I guess, preparing for a game, I'm a glass-half-full guy, and I'm always concerned. But no, I mean, I would never be embarrassed by the team, just none of us want to get beat bad. We want to be competitive. There's no question that in this game that we belonged with a 6 seed from beginning to end. The final score is going to say that they won and they're going to advance, but once again, we ran a play, it worked, it was all there, and their kid did a great job of getting a hand on the pass, or Dylan is shooting a lay-up or dunking it, and we win or they make some reckless play at the other end and beat us again. They get the win, we get the loss. That doesn't mean that our performance wasn't as good as we could ask for. Q. Could you just talk about the mindset going into that last sequence? Any options you may have had a chance to talk to your team about? RICK BYRD: Yeah, we had -- there was a time-out with 59 seconds left, and we called the play that we ran, a back-door play. Regardless, regardless of what happened on the other end, we -- if we needed to score quick, we would have done it sooner. We did exactly the same thing at UCLA that we just did. As it turned out, something happened that we got the ball inside the shot clock, and I can't actually tell you what that was, but we ended up with the ball one down with less than 30 seconds left. Felt really good about the play. I think our guys felt really good about the play. When you're playing a team as good as they are and you have a play you feel really good about, I'd like to think that the odds are on the high side of 50/50 that it works and you win the game. You know, there's a lot of people that wouldn't do that, I think. They'd go ahead and try to get it -- I just didn't have anything I thought was better, and I thought if we scored it too quick, we'd have a hard time stopping them from scoring or stopping them from getting the rebound and scoring. I just felt like the odds were better with us trying to go for one, down one. Q. For Dylan, can you just take us through that last sequence? Did you slip because the ball was tipped or did you slip before it was tipped? DYLAN WINDLER: Well, obviously I went back door. I thought the pass was a little short, so yeah, I tried to come back to the ball, slipped trying to get back to the ball. You know, it was a tough play to make. It was a tight window for the pass. I would say it's desperation, you have to throw it, so I'm not blaming anybody on anything. It was, like I said, desperation. He made the best pass he could. I think it was a little short, so I tried to come back and get it, and slipped and they got the ball. RICK BYRD: Yeah, I think the pass would have been there. If the defender on him didn't get a hand on it, that's a great play by him, but I think it looked to me like -- I can watch it later. Looked to me like the timing was perfect. I loved what I saw when Dylan's man bit on the pass fake, and he had good distance between himself and his man and the kid gets his hand up like he's supposed to, makes a good play, a winning play. Q. For Coach Byrd, you mentioned the run coming out after halftime. Did you notice any adjustments they made that were difficult for you to meet coming out after halftime? RICK BYRD: You know, I think they were going to focus on making us guard them inside first and foremost, and you know, if you'd have told me that Fernando was going to be 5 for 10 in the game, I would have been completely happy with that. But we just -- we've done this, these guys will admit, too often this year. We've come out of halftime -- in fact, we started coming out earlier, about two-thirds of the way through the season, to try to get them out there and going. We had a lead. We'd played well. But they certainly came out with a far more aggressive mindset. I think it was way more about that than what they did different than what they had done in the first half or what we had done differently. And I think that's to their credit, and it's to our bad. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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