NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: FIRST ROUND - WISCONSIN VS NORTH CAROLINA

March 19, 2021

Roy Williams

North Carolina Tar Heels

Mackey Arena

Postgame Media Conference

Wisconsin - 85, North Carolina - 62

THE MODERATOR: We'll begin with an opening statement by Coach Williams.

COACH WILLIAMS: I apologize for blowing my nose in public, but I'm a little emotional at times. And the last game is extremely emotional. I've been very lucky, I've been in the locker room four times -- one as an assistant, three as a head coach where the last game of the year was really emotional in a good way.

Before I say anything else, I just thought that Coach Gard, I call him Greg, I think he and his staff did a great job getting their kids so much ready to play -- every loose ball it seemed they got. Every time we gave them an open look and some of them even not open they made shots. 13-for-27 from the 3-point line. And Davison and Trice getting 29 and 21.

Those kids played really well. And the big guys fought our big guys and blocked shots and made it difficult for us to score inside, particularly in the first half. I just congratulate Greg and his staff on the job they did, and congratulate their kids.

They didn't finish the season as well as they would have liked. I think it was three of their last four were losses or something like that. But those seniors, when you get into tournament play sometimes, they really, really want something. And they work exceptionally hard for that. And they performed tonight. So, congratulations to them.

My club, I didn't do a very good job. It's been a difficult year. But everybody's had the problems with COVID that we've had. It's been a hard year to push and pull, push and pull every other day to try to get something done.

But how can you be any luckier than Roy Williams is coaching basketball?

I didn't think we shot it very well. We took some bad shots in the first half. I forget now I think we had, what did we have, six turnovers in the first half? And then --

Q. Six.

COACH WILLIAMS: Six turnovers in the first half. Had eight bad shots. That's 14 of the same thing. Bad shots and turnovers lead to run-outs. And I thought our turnovers and bad shots were the key factor in the game other than the fact that their shots went in.

I don't know what they shot for the game. Well, 50.1. But 48 from the 3-point line. So I thought our bad shots and turnovers hurt us in the first half. They outrebounded us in the first half. I think at the end of the game they still outrebounded us 37-34. Not many people have done that.

So their coaching staff got them to be more in tuned and more focused with better desire and more alert to go for the offensive rebounds. And gotta congratulate them. They played very, very well, I think. Greg gets to evaluate his own team, but I thought they played very well. And Roy Williams didn't coach very well.

Q. You mentioned the emotion that comes with the last game of the season. Can you just elaborate on the particular emotion that comes with this group of players, these specific guys, this specific season? What makes this one different?

COACH WILLIAMS: I think I'm so proud of them as young people. This was a hard year, guys. Come on. A lot of the stuff you remember from your freshman year in college, none of my freshmen have any memories of anything like that. You've heard me say before they went to class for six days and that's it. They haven't had the college experience that a normal student has had. They haven't had the college experience of home football weekends and how the pageantry and college football and everything is so much fun.

They haven't had the experience of running out of that tunnel with 21,750 people going crazy. We had Tyler Hansbrough and Bobby Frasor -- may have been somebody else; I think we had three players here today. But Tyler told me one time he'd do anything to run out of that tunnel again.

I'm so proud of our kids for going through this and it wasn't nearly as much fun as it's been in the past. I'm proud of that. I'm proud of the fact that we had seven freshmen in our top 10 or 11 players. And 11 players, I guess, seven freshmen.

And I think that Greg's team, with eight seniors or six seniors and four of them redshirt seniors, or whatever, you love to have an experienced team in March. I loved having my team regardless of what grade they were in.

So it's just when you coach kids, you have a special bond with them. And this year was really hard on young people. And I was really proud of that.

Q. Early in the second half, I think it was, I think Davis had a long 3-point from the top of the key. You turned and shrugged your shoulders. How much of what they did from the perimeter was what you allowed them to do, and how much was it just guys are just sporting shots and there's not a lot you can do about it?

COACH WILLIAMS: I don't think we allowed them to do anything. In sports, basketball, it's man on man a lot of times. I think Caleb and RJ and Kerwin, they wanted to do well.

We weren't good enough or experienced enough or coached well enough or all of the above tonight. But it's frustrating, guys. I mean, like I said, we take bad shots and turn the ball over and that's been an Achilles' heel for us all year long. But the kids do want to do well. I never had a kid that wanted to turn the ball over. I've never had a kid that wanted to miss a shot.

But as one of the lowest field-goal percentages of any team I've ever coached, one of the lowest 3-point percentage, one of the lowest free-throw percentage -- in some ways it may have been the worst at all. But kids didn't want to miss them, I know that.

But the bottom line is 13 out of 27 for them, five out of 13 for us. So that's eight. So they outscore us by 24 points from the 3-point line. Their guys made shots. And for somebody to outrebound us 37-34, I think there's two other times, could have been three, that somebody's outrebounded us all year.

So you look at that. And 15 assists, seven turnovers for them. It's just sometimes the other guy on that particular moment is just better than you are. And that's what happened tonight. At this specific moment their team, their players, their coaches were better than we were.

Q. What do you want the young guys to kind of take from this NCAA experience that down the line that they will learn from in future years?

COACH WILLIAMS: The same things I've always said, when you lose hope it will be fuel for you to say you don't like this feeling, that you want to have a different feeling. And the way to have a different feeling is to play better. And the way you play better is to prepare better. You practice harder, you're more focused, you're more disciplined. That's what I hope they use this as, as fuel.

Basketball can be the greatest game in the world but when you lose it's like somebody reaches in and grabs your heart and shakes it right in front of you. Sort of taunts you a little bit. But coaching basketball, that's pretty dadgum good.

Q. I realize you didn't get the team to come along as much as you would have wanted them to this year. Given the youth and inexperience of this team, is there some building blocks there from what you saw over the last couple of the weeks of the season?

COACH WILLIAMS: I think so. You guys, I hate to, when you start talking about how inexperienced your youth or seven freshmen, that sounds like excuses. And I don't want to use that. But it is facts. They are facts, I guess is better English. But I think we've got the foundation that can be really something.

But kids nowadays have decisions to make, whether to leave early, go to the NBA. We'll have to wait and see how those situations pan out. But it is something that the foundation here is to -- is something that could be really, really special.

I remember Tyler Hansbrough's freshman year, started three freshmen start of the season, and then started just two down the stretch but still played four or five. I said at the end they're going to be really good. And they were. They won the national championship as a senior, and as a junior went to the Final Four.

But times are different now and there will be a lot of different pulls to them or pulls at them, stresses and pressures that they and their families feel. So we'll just have to wait and see.

Q. I just want to know how have you grown this season, and what will you take away to be a better coach going forward?

COACH WILLIAMS: I started the season when I was 70 years old. I feel like I'm 103 right now. So that's the first thing that's happened. It has been a trying year. It has been a year that, 2020 and the first part of 2021, I haven't enjoyed that much. It's been a lot of stresses, a lot of things on.

But I think that each year you get to be a better coach. You'll get more experienced yourself. And this year I focused almost every press conference on talking about turnovers or not the quality, high quality of shots that I wanted us to get and not running at the pace we wanted to run. So some way, somehow I've got to do a better job of getting the guys to make changes.

And 29 games I'm still saying a lot of the same kind of things. So I've got to figure out a way to make that happen.

Q. Armando obviously had an explosive start to the second half. Really got involved quickly. What do you think took him so long to get going? I think he had one shot in the first half. What did you see happening there?

COACH WILLIAMS: He played about ten minutes but he had one shot. And I don't know if he had a rebound. He had one rebound or zero, something like that. So the first half was pretty ugly. And I challenged our big guys to be more effective in the second half, to be more aggressive. And I think we did that.

And if we could have done that for the entire course of the game, it would have been a lot better for us. I don't know that we would have won because they were really, really good. But I think he did focus much better in the second half, and Garrison as well. At half Armando was 0-for-1 and Garrison was 1-for-7. And those are kids that have led our team basically all season long. That's what I would say, that we perhaps focused on it a little better.