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BIG EAST CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENT

March 10, 2010

Herb Pope

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

Notre Dame Â– 68
Seton Hall - 54

THE MODERATOR: Coach Bobby Gonzalez, Jeremy Hazell, Eugene Harvey and Herb Pope.
COACH BOBBY GONZALEZ: Start with an opening statement. Just first and foremost, we give Notre Dame credit. Mike Brey is a class guy that had a good job with his team. And again not an excuse. Certainly, but I thought this was the most tired I've seen our team the entire year. We just didn't have our legs. It shows how important the bye is and how important the regular season is.
It's the second year in a row now that we've played South Florida last year and beat them, then played Syracuse in the second round. We hung with them for about 32 minutes and then we kind of died. And I thought well, we only had six players. Maybe next year -- I thought this year would be different. But what really hurt us, too, was this was our fourth game in six days. We played at Rutgers, then at Providence, then Providence again and then tonight. When you see things like 2 for 16 from three, we struggled to get into the 50s. I'm not knocking Notre Dame's defense. It's different than Providence's defense. But for us to score 106 last night and come back tonight and barely struggle to get 56, you know, it took Jamel Jackson banking in a three-pointer and Jordan Theodore to laying in at the buzzer to 56 points.
We just plain and simple couldn't make a shot, had no legs and we were beat up. Notre Dame was fresh. They took advantage of that. Jeremy's back cramped up a little bit. We had a lot of guys banged up. Keon's knee. Herb got in early foul trouble. We had nobody score more than 15 points. Too many guys not play well on the same day. Jordan Theodore was basically 0 for 9. He had 18 at Rutgers, 19 at Providence, 21 last night. And he had -- he was 1 for 9. But the shot he made was the lay-up at the buzzer when they moved out of the way.
So we just had too many guys not play well. And you're not going to beat a team like Notre Dame in a situation like that.
THE MODERATOR: Questions, please.

Q. When Mike was in the here, he told everybody to take a deep breath, keep Seton Hall on the board for the NCAA Tournament. What's your reaction to that?
COACH BOBBY GONZALEZ: Well, I couldn't agree with him more. I know that -- for some reason, there's all these gurus and experts that listen to what everybody else says. And they say well, if Notre Dame wins, they're in. If Seton Hall wins, they're in. But if Notre Dame doesn't win, then they're still in anyway. If Seton Hall wins, they're out. Coming into this game tonight, our RPI was higher than Notre Dame. Our strength of schedule was higher than Notre Dame. We both have three wins against the top 50. And we beat them head to head. So I'm not quite sure where they got that from on the resume and who they thought had a better profile. We had no bad losses. And people thought they had three bad losses. Now they had 21 wins; we had 19 wins. But we played a tougher schedule. So this is not about us and Notre Dame. This is about the BIG EAST. So should we get nine teams in? Ten teams? Should we get more than eight? If teams go out and win their conferences and all of a sudden there's a bunch of at-large bids out there, we had no bad losses in 31 games. There's no doubt we can beat somebody if we go to the NCAA Tournament. No doubt. And especially with some rest.
So, you know, I think we should be on the board. I think all this talk about the bubble has burst and now we're out and we're done and we lost and that's it and it's over, I don't think people know what they're talking about. I don't think they have a clue. I think they listen to what everybody else says and they repeat what they hear.

Q. When you talked to your players before a game like this, do you tell them to block it all out? Or could you put it all on yourself and involve the discussion around?
COACH BOBBY GONZALEZ: Well, we basically said the more you win, the more you have -- the more you keep your destiny in your own hands. So certainly we talked about how big the game was. But we didn't make it life and death, like if we lose the season is over, because it's not over. We're going to play in some postseason. The question is which one, which tournament? Hopefully we still have a shot to be in the Big Dance. If you watched us this year, there's plenty of people that saw us that think we're an NCAA team.

Q. Bobby, no matter what tournament you're in, postseason tournament, you now have time for your walking wounded pretty much to heal, obviously.
COACH BOBBY GONZALEZ: Definitely. These guys need some time. Jeremy with his back, Keon with his knee, Herb, everybody. We need a couple of days to regroup. It was grueling down the stretch for us. Sometimes you go through a little injury thing. We kind of avoided it the whole year. And it kind of -- nothing major, but everything sort of came at the end. Little nicks and knacks all came at the end.

Q. I wonder if you can sort of speak to, you had Herb out after he had his second foul. Then you brought him back in I think with under 5:00 left and he picks up the third. Why bring him back in at that point?
COACH BOBBY GONZALEZ: Well, basically the game was getting away from us. We had to. I felt if I hadn't put him in, we might be down 15 at the half and we may not be in the game. We couldn't get a rebound. They had nine rebounds. When I put Herb back in, it was basically to try to save us from going under water. I told him not to get a third. He plays so hard. He's so aggressive. He maybe got an incidental foul that maybe didn't have to be called.

Q. You guys like to play up tempo as everybody knows. How frustrating is it when a team slows it to crawl?
EUGENE HARVEY: It's pretty frustrating. But then again, like we're a team and we have to play the game like that like we did in Pitt. We played together and we got the win. So that made it difficult on me because Bobby, he's a run-and-gun coach. That's our style of play. But Notre Dame they came out and they defended, they locked it down, they made the tough plays and they got the win.

Q. Herb, when you picked up that third foul with how well Harangody was playing, did you feel it sort of hampered your ability to play defense on him in the second half?
HERB POPE: No. Coach kind of told me not to go out there and get a foul. I kind of thought the ball was a loose ball. I wasn't sure that he secured it. That was just a bad judgment call. I have to learn and grow from it as a young player.
And Harangody obviously was killing us from early on in the game. I was just trying to slow him down as much as I could when I came back in without getting a fourth foul.
COACH BOBBY GONZALEZ: Let me say something about Herb Pope: I'm really proud of this guy. This guy was just magnificent down the stretch. 14 points, 9 rebounds. With the foul trouble, he only played 29 minutes. One of the difficult things coming into this game, Luke Harangody played five minutes against Marquette, you don't know how healthy he is. They've won four in a row. Everybody is saying they're not going to switch it up too much. Because they don't want to mess up their chemistry because they're playing really good. We beat them the first time with him. Now we're going to play the second time without him. We don't know where he is at health-wise. We know he had four days off. He comes in and 15 points and 9 rebounds in the first half. It was a difficult thing to prepare for.
So again I thought Herb and Jeff and these guys adjusted on the fly very, very well. I thought for to us win tonight, we needed to be clicking on all cylinders. We needed Jeremy Hazell and all our guns to be rolling.
THE MODERATOR: Any other questions? Seton Hall, thank you.

End of FastScripts

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