NCAA MEN'S FINAL FOUR

March 29, 1996

Jim Boeheim

COACH BOEHEIM: First of all I'm very happy to be here. I just want to make sure everybody realizes I'm happy, smiling. My man, Dick Weiss said I should stop whining, which I'd like to, but that's not possible (laughter) but we'll try to keep it for the rest of this season. We won't do that anymore. We're happy to be here, we played well until the regional. This team's played pretty consistently all year long. And we think there's a tremendous challenge here, Mississippi State as I've said, a couple of times, has just beaten three of the top five teams, maybe in the country, in the last couple of weeks, so we know how good they are. And it's a tremendous challenge, but we're looking forward to playing. Questions?

COACH BOEHEIM: I think probably when Jacque Vaughn missed that shot is probably the first time I thought about the Final Four this year. Actually when we started off this season we started poorly in the exhibition games and then we got off to a great start and went to Arizona on the way to Hawaii; that I felt would be a good test. And we get beat by between 10 and 15 and go to Hawaii. But we played great. And that we did have a good basketball team and our zone defense was effective in that particular game and we played well in Hawaii. And the trip just seemed to take a lot out of us. We lost to Massachusetts, went to Miami and lost. And we had a couple more tough trips in there. Then after that we started to play pretty good then. I felt going into the tournament we were playing good enough to win a couple of games in the tournament if things went right. And once you get to that point, the Georgia game could have -- we could have easily been home and that would have been it, probably just pretty much did what people would have thought or hoped for. We just made a couple great plays at the end of regulation and overtime and then played pretty well against Kansas. When you're good enough to get to the 16, and I always thought we were, then anything can happen in college basketball. A couple weeks before the tournament we did an interview locally and somebody asked me what I thought the makeup of the tournament would be, I thought it would be two or three of five teams. Obviously Massachusetts and Kentucky were two of the five and the other -- and then I said maybe even three of the five top teams will get here, but there will be one team there that just plays well and gets on a roll. And as it turns out it's two teams. That has happened a lot of years and probably will happen a lot of years.

COACH BOEHEIM: At ease?

COACH BOEHEIM: I don't know. I have a hell of a time judging myself. I let all you guys do that. I don't know, I've been doing this a long time. And I think -- thinking back to the last time we were, it's a long time ago in '87, it seemed to -- seems to be a little bit easier now or less stressful, if that's possible, although I don't think it's a big difference. People around me don't think I'm much easier to get along with now. (Laughter).

COACH BOEHEIM: I don't think I'm smart enough to figure that out. I'm not sure. I'm sure there's a lot of ramifications in there, but my general feeling is that the tournament committee has done a great job in seeding, and when you look at who gets where in the last few years it's a difficult situation, I don't think I would want to re-seed the teams, really.

COACH BOEHEIM: I don't think I got real smart over the summer. I've never felt that way. I don't subscribe to that theory that some years coaches do a better coaching job than they do other years. If that were the case, then why wouldn't we just do a better job with each team? The bottom line is some teams might listen better, some teams might execute better. Last year's team took a time out we didn't have or we might have been in the Final Four last year. So it was just one little thing. If John Wallace doesn't make the jump shot against Georgia, did I do a great coaching job this year? Nobody would have said yes. Nobody would have said really anything. We all, as coaches, try to do the best we can. Sometimes when you have more talent it can be more difficult, and what appears to be a more talented team may not be. I've seen some teams with high ratings from so-called high school recruiting analysts that never get in the NCAA tournament. Did those coaches do a bad job or were those players just overrated? And that's the case a lot of times. There's a lot of guys going to college that are rated in the top 10 in their high school class and I don't think they're really that good. Yet that coach is now accused of underachieving or not getting out of what? Well, rated by who? Two high school guys that never coached in their life and never did anything with players and they're all of a sudden putting a number on some kid in high school. And some of them, yes, some of them are. But if you look at the draft picks every year, the guys that are the first draft picks there's been many years when the first five picks in the draft none of them were McDonald's All Americans. So when you start talking about you have more talent or you don't have more talent, in '87 we went, the perception was we had great talent. In '87 we were underdogs all the way through the tournament.

COACH BOEHEIM: I never do give scouting reports, so we're not going to get into that. Basically I'm scared as I said before, because of the way Mississippi State has played. I'm hopeful that we'll continue to play the way we've played, which is we've played very well defensively. We've been pretty solid on offense and hopefully that's the way we'll play. The biggest task in the tournament as you go along is to not get too excited and not get thinking about the situation you're in and just play. And the hardest time is that Regional Final when I think kids start thinking about the Final Four and the jump shot becomes a little hard to put down and we didn't really get to that point. A little bit at the end, a couple little things that we didn't do that were a little bit because of the tension and pressure of going to the Final Four. But the same thing happened with Kansas, they didn't do a couple of things that they would normally do because of that pressure. And the same thing applies here. You try to get to go out and play like it isn't the Final Four, but, you know, it still is.

COACH BOEHEIM: It's the two seniors, they've been tremendous, and the coaching task is to give those guys the situation they can be productive in. And they have to do it. And they've both done it from the beginning, they've led this team, and they're the guys that are responsible for us being here, the way they've led the team, more than anything else.

COACH BOEHEIM: No, I'm happy. And I'm happy to be here. So I'm not going to say a word. I'm going to give them a whole new image this year (laughter). It probably won't last long, but I'll try my best. I think Mississippi State should be real upset because they just beat Kentucky two weeks ago, and beat the No. 1 seed, Connecticut and beat a team, Cincinnati that probably could have been a one seed. If anybody is upset I think Mississippi State should be. I hope they don't get upset and try to take it out on us. But we got to Denver and it snowed. We got to New Jersey and it snowed, so we're right at home. We feel great. The reason we didn't come down early like John did, it was 68 degrees in Syracuse, and you get two days a year like that, we didn't want to leave on the one day it was 68. Summer was this week. By the time we get back up there it will be fall already.

COACH BOEHEIM: We've always played zone, but in different years. I remember one year we played 90 percent zone. And some years we've played five percent or ten percent zone. The more physical you are the more -- the quicker, the better talented athlete you have -- the more I think you tend to want to play man-to-man. When the three point line came in everybody went away from zone and we did, also. What we've tried to do is adjust our zone over the last two or three years so we could still play it with the three point line being a factor. We've been able to hold people around 29 percent from the three point line this year. So we've been able to do that, but not all the time. And there's some games when we're not able to do that that we have to go away from the zone. And we've played probably 50 percent man-to-man this year. So it's not -- it wouldn't be a shock for us to have to go away with that, after we beat Arizona, we win the Illinois game, played five possessions, they scored five for five in Hawaii against our zone. And we played the next 20 to 25 minutes man-to-man. So that would not be something we could not do.

COACH BOEHEIM: He got off to a slow start. He started off well, and then got hurt in one of our games and missed a couple of games, lost his spot, really struggled for a long time. He couldn't get himself back in there. The guy beat him out. And finally midway later in the year he started playing better, and got his spot back. And I think has really played well down the stretch. He's proven why we were right in the beginning to make him a starter.