NCAA MEN'S BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP: REGIONAL SEMIFINAL: ORAL ROBERTS VS ARKANSAS

March 27, 2021

Eric Musselman

Bankers Life Fieldhouse

Arkansas Razorbacks

Sweet 16 Postgame Media Conference

Arkansas - 72, Oral Roberts - 70

THE MODERATOR: Welcome, Coach Musselman. We're going to start with an opening statement. Make sure you're identifying yourself.

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Really proud of our team, especially in the second half, with their effort. We've been down now in three games and found a way to come back. Regrouped again at halftime, changed up our defense a little bit more, where we wanted to trap and lead certain players.

Give Oral Roberts a ton of credit. I thought they played really, really well, played really hard. We made a decision that we were going to try to limit No. 0 as best we could on his pick and pops. I thought we did a really good job limiting him to seven field goals attempted, Justin Smith did a great job. We just felt there was no way we could let both 0 and 3 have big games.

When they went to their bench, we kind of left the bench players and tried to trap the ball, and I thought that really helped ignite our transition offense in the second half.

Q. Coach, congratulations. I was wondering if you could just talk about Devo's play tonight and obviously the big shot there at the end.

ERIC MUSSELMAN: I mean, we don't run any plays for Devo, at least not right now. We will next year, obviously, but he's just a guy that just balls. He just plays. You look across the board, and first of all, he guarded Abmas, No. 3. I thought he did a great job. Even though he had 25, he took 19 shots. We held him to three threes, which he's such a great three-point shooter with great range, but he did have five turnovers.

So you're asking Devo to guard at a high level. He goes out and has eight rebounds, 16 points, two assists. His rebounding was phenomenal. Even Desi, I thought Desi did a great job on the glass getting six boards. We felt like we had a mismatch in the post with certain matchups. I thought Jalen Tate did a great job scoring points in the paint.

We weren't great offensively tonight, but obviously found a way to win. I thought some of our steals helped us, but Devo was phenomenal on both sides of the ball, defensively and offensively.

Q. Coach, you mentioned the early deficits. Has there been a common theme in these three games behind those deficits? What's contributed to those, and what was the key tonight to digging out that have hole?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: You've got to keep searching as a team, as a coaching staff, for a matchup you like. We worked all week on our pick-and-roll coverage. I thought it was decent. Looking at the first two games Oral Roberts played, I thought our pick-and-roll defense was probably a little bit more effective than what they saw in Games 1 and 2. Not much, though, but slightly.

But I thought our trapping and trying to get the ball out of certain players' hands was very effective. We didn't want to do that going into the game because they have so many surrounding pieces that are shooters.

Certainly, we'd all like to get out to a lead, but at the end of the day, there's going to be runs. Right now we've been a really, really good second-half team all year, and you've got to be able to make adjustments at halftime. We basically resorted to our plan D coverage. I'm just glad we had a full week to go through multiple coverages. Now, that won't be the case heading into the next game on Monday.

Q. Eric, I know that wasn't a designed play, Tate to Devo. They're obviously making plays in the flow of the game. What did you see there, and is that something you guys kind of worked on?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: We ran one of our go-to plays late in the game, a fist out red. Part of the red is a snake action on the weak side, and Devo just kind of read it and ran a snake action to kind of semi bend it or curl it. I thought Tate made the right read.

Devo is just a guy -- you know, he's a shot creator. For a freshman, that's a pretty big stage to ask him to do what we ask him to do defensively and then to hit some of the shots that he hit. Even in the first half, I thought his dribble drive, when he sliced through the defense, was our best offensive play in the first half. I thought he played with a different energy, especially in the first half.

It's been really, really neat and cool to watch him continue to grow and to watch his confidence continue to grow.

And by the way, Devo's been walking around with sunglasses. So he's feeling pretty good about the way he's playing too.

Q. Coach, Jalen Tate kind of kept you all afloat offensively in the first half. He scored pretty well in the second half and then finished with six assists for the game. I guess could you just speak to the importance of his play. He hit some pretty important shots down the stretch before Devo's.

ERIC MUSSELMAN: Yeah, he hit huge shots, and just his size against their guards, that was one of the focal points of the game plan offensively was to try to -- you know, with our bigger guards, was to score it. We needed him to play well.

Desi provided really good bench minutes, but we didn't get much out of our bench other than Desi coming in, and Desi did a good job defensively, and he did a good job rebounding the basketball as well for his position. It was just kind of their bench didn't score. Really unique game in that aspect.

But our free throws going from 13 to 15 from the line, not a high volume of FTAs at all in this game. I thought there was a little more physical contact maybe.

But we converted our foul shots, which is extremely, extremely important. And then I like the fact that we had seven steals to just ten turnovers, and a couple of those turnovers were -- early in the game, we had two that we shouldn't have had, and then I thought we turned the ball over in that transition segment back to back, just trying to make home run plays, which were not -- we have got to take great care of the basketball against Baylor. They're very physical defensively. They reach, swipe at the basketball, and you're going to have to be strong with the ball and make secure decision-making when you play Baylor.

Q. Coach, congrats on the win. The final position defensively, Devo said you kind of expected Abmas to banana cut and catch the ball. Did you give any thought to just totally denying him the ball and making somebody else beat you?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: We didn't deny it, but we didn't guard the inbounder. I think Thompson inbounded the ball. He's a good shooter. Tate and Devo were just trying to semi use clock. He got a look obviously. We did not want to foul either, Jeff. That was the last thing we want to do is foul one of the best free-throw shooters in all of college basketball.

But we felt like two defenders and trying to keep the ball in front, what we didn't want to do is we didn't want to deny him the ball, have him flash the guy, and then hit off the deny where he now has a lane or an open shot with nobody in front of him. That's the reason that we didn't deny. We talked about it, we discussed it, and felt like if we could just cup him with two guys, that was better than having him make a Z cut and end up with the ball off of denial.

Q. Your father, Bill, was a coach for 25 years. And Scott Drew's father, Homer, won more than 600 games. And Wayne Tinkle coached his son, and Jim Boeheim's best player is his son, Buddy. What makes the father-son bond so special when it comes to basketball coaches?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: That's a great question. I'm sure that each person that you just mentioned has their own story. My dad -- I mean, I can only speak for myself. My father was my idol, my best friend. For Halloween, I wanted to be a coach. After school, when I was in grade school, my mom would drop me off at my dad's practices, and I'd stay until 10:00 or 11:00 at night until he'd finish breaking down film or having staff meetings.

I just wanted to walk in his footsteps, and now I have my own son on staff here, and he obviously wants to get into coaching. I have a younger son in college, and I know he wants to get into coaching when he graduates from University of San Diego.

Everyone's got their own story, but when you're around it, you either fall in love with it -- and I know a lot of coaches' sons that aren't in coaching because it's a tough life. It's a conversation that my mother and I had several, several times when I decided to get into coaching, just how difficult it is. Coaches get fired, and it affects family. But it's what I loved. But I was warned by my mom, I promise you that.

Q. You mentioned Devo's growth, his confidence growing. What have been the important steps along the way to bring him to this point?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: It's really interesting. I kind of look at sometimes freshmen like NBA first round draft picks. Sometimes guys are just handed minutes. I don't know if that's the proper way to teach a player. Devo has turned into one of the best defenders in college basketball.

That was not the case this summer. I would actually say he was pretty far behind defensively, and he worked, and he grew, and he continued to come into practice. He continued to watch film. He continued to study.

A lot of freshmen play early in nonconference, and then their minutes dwindle in conference play. We took the opposite approach with two of our freshmen where they learned through nonconference. They learned our terminology, both Jaylin Williams and Devo. And then once conference play came, they understood who we were, what the expectations were, and both those guys have grown tremendously, and they've done it against better competition as the season's gone on.

Both those freshmen, along with Moses, have incredible confidence. Devo is an incredible competitor, and he believes that he's a great, great player, and that's why he's able to take big shots, and he's able to take big defensive assignments.

Q. You obviously mentioned that Devo was walking around with sunglasses on. Did he have like a little confident strut? What kind of sunglasses was he wearing when he was walking around?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: They're not the type of sunglasses I would wear down in Pacific Beach in San Diego, but I don't know, he just all of a sudden, the last 48 hours, been wearing sunglasses into our dinners or breakfasts. Yeah, so I think he's got -- if he's wearing them and I haven't seen them -- he might have been wearing them around me prior to this, but even when the sun's not out, he's wearing them, which maybe I ought to start wearing a pair as well.

Q. Follow-up questions about people that wear sunglasses, a PFT commenter of Pardon My Take, one of your biggest fans, what do you have to say to those guys at Pardon My Take about your post-game celebration so far?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: We don't celebrate too much. We've just got to get ready. I love Pardon My Take, you know that.

Q. In 2016 you had a heartbreaker against Loyola, and tonight you're on the good side of one of those tight games. How would you compare and contrast the emotions, what you're feeling now compared to what that was like? How sweet is it to be in the Elite Eight?

ERIC MUSSELMAN: It's an incredible feeling to be in an Elite Eight just our second year. I really can't describe it. Yeah, when they took the last three -- against Loyola, it was a side step three almost in the exact same spot on the floor. We had defended it perfectly, and they made the shot. We were probably one shot away from beating Loyola and being in the Elite Eight that year. I still think about that shot over and over. I guess tonight the basketball gods were looking over us.