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STATE FARM MISSOURI VALLEY CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 6, 2020

St. Louis, Missouri - Arch Madness

Drake - 77, Northern Iowa - 56

THE MODERATOR: Northern Iowa Panthers with us now. Head Coach Ben Jacobson, A.J. Green, and Austin Phyfe represent the student body. We're going to ask them to make a statement on the game, then we'll go to questions for all three representatives of UNI.

BEN JACOBSON: Thanks. We played great for all of it, for all four months. You just like to play your best, and today, we didn't. Had we played our best, I don't know that we would have won. Drake still may have beat us. Drake played good. Give them credit for the way that they played today, and they played good yesterday.

So when I say that, that doesn't mean we would have won the game, but today wasn't -- it wasn't our best. We've been great for four months. So, again, I give Drake credit for the way in which they played.

Our guys -- we haven't been behind very much, very often this year, each time we have, we fought back and got it to a one possession game. Today we had it back to a two-point game and missed a three that would have put us up one. That one there may have been enough to turn the tide and maybe tip it over the edge.

I'm proud of our guys for getting it to a point there early in the second half where we were in position to get the lead and it didn't go.

Q. Ben, what stuck out this go around with Drake? Obviously, you guys had a lot of success with them less than a week ago when it came to their playing and what they were trying to do against you guys today.
BEN JACOBSON: There wasn't anything noticeably different with what Drake was doing or with what we were doing. They played better in this game than they played a week ago, and that's always a part of this when it happens this way. I felt like there were some plays at the offensive end we didn't execute, some of the things at the end of offensive possessions as well as we have, and it didn't feel like we blocked out. When you add those things up, we gave away some possessions at the offensive end. We gave them some second chances at our defensive end, and those are things that we just haven't done a lot of.

We've done a great job. We've been highly efficient offensively than we were a week ago in that game, and we've been a terrific defensive rebounding team, one of the top defensive rebounding teams in the country. So both of those things were going on, and Drake was playing good basketball. That's where I give our guys a ton of credit. To cut it to ten at half and then to cut it to a two-point game after all that was going on for most of the first half.

Q. What do you look at as what prevented your team from playing at the level that it had earlier in the season as you mentioned too? Was there anything that you saw early in this game that looked different out there?
BEN JACOBSON: Not really. Other than what I just mentioned, I don't -- we left a couple possessions on the table offensively, and we didn't block them out very good, and that's enough, right? That's a lot of a basketball game. Boy, outside of that, our guys played their tails off. When I talk about we left some possessions on the table and we didn't block them out, it wasn't because we didn't play our tails off. Our guys practiced well this week. So all of those things were great.

Then we hadn't been in that spot. We got it to two, and as it got back to 8 or 10 or 12, when it got to that part of the game, we hadn't been in that spot all year. So it's the first time we had to handle that part of it. There wasn't anything, other than what I mentioned. Fundamentally, we've been really good. We left some plays on the table at both ends in the first 20 minutes. Otherwise, it's a tie game at half, and maybe we have a chance to come out and get up eight or ten, and we just left too many plays on the table.

Q. Austin, you hit that three-point play inside to get it down to two in the second half. Can you talk a little bit about kind of where the team was at at that moment, and what were the challenges of just kind of turning the corner from there and being able to continue to build on that?
AUSTIN PHYFE: For sure, like Coach said, first half we were down a little bit. We were just overthinking some things and not playing our type of basketball. Then in the second half, getting the crowd into a bit and having some momentum was really big for us.

Q. A.J., Coach had mentioned how at the end of some of the offensive possessions, the execution wasn't quite as sharp as it needed to be. It was certainly tough out there for you today. What were you seeing? I mean, how difficult was it for you to find space and get the looks you were trying to get?
A.J. GREEN: I think I was able to get some of my spots, but I think I might have just rushed it a few times too early in the possession. I maybe didn't just stick with what we were doing a week ago, just letting our offense work for us, and then when I have shots, just shoot it.

Q. Coach, you guys have been in conversations for an at-large bid for the NCAA Tournament for a couple weeks now. Do you think this changes those chances? And how are you going to prepare for that decision?
BEN JACOBSON: Yeah, our -- man, as I mentioned, these guys, what a four months that these guys have put together. That's all of the resume, except for today. And I bring that up because this is going to have an impact on it. Any time you lose a game -- had we lost last week at Drake or at home to Southern or Evansville, any of those games are going to impact where you stand.

But there's a lot -- between now and next Sunday, there's a lot of teams that are playing, a lot of conference tournaments that are going. So the team sheets that look like ours, the ones that they'll be comparing, there's a lot that's going to happen with those. These guys have done an unbelievable job. We've been between -- when you look at the different -- the NET rankings and KenPom and the different rankings and you look at the AP poll or the USA Today coaches poll, we've been between, basically, 26 and 40 the entire year, once you get to mid-December or late December. From January 1 on, we've been pretty well between 26 and 40, and that's an NCAA Tournament team.

When you add all of that up with everything these guys have done this year and you put our team sheet down next to the rest of them, yeah, I feel like -- this obviously doesn't help, but it doesn't change what happened for four months, and that's, when they get to next Saturday night and Sunday, they're looking at everything that happened over the course of the four months, and that's where I feel great about these guys and I feel great about what we've done.

Q. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is the first time in your time here where it's been kind of a wait like this to Selection Sunday where you guys have been right on the bubble for an at large. How will you guys approach this next week just in terms of keeping an eye on what you think needs to happen, or will you guys go back to practice, business as usual?
BEN JACOBSON: We're playing either way. We're either in the NIT, or we're getting an at-large bid. So how we structure our practices and what we do will be the same way we have in 2016, 2015, the years that we've known we're in the NCAA Tournament. We'll do everything exactly the same.

Then there's -- we don't have control over how the games turn out and what happens. I follow all that stuff, and I'll be tracking it, and we'll be talking about it with the guys. They've earned that. They're right in the middle of the at-large picture. So we'll talk about it some during the week, but we'll be able to approach it the same because we're playing no matter what. So we'll be ready to play whether we get an at-large bid or we're playing in the NIT. We'll be ready to play.

THE MODERATOR: Gentlemen, thank you very much.

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