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NCAA MEN'S 1ST & 2ND ROUNDS: JACKSONVILLEMarch 18, 2010Louis DaleSteve DonahueJeff FooteJon JaquesRyan WittmanJACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA THE MODERATOR: Anybody have questions for the student-athletes from Cornell? Q. This question is for Jeff or really any of you guys. Obviously going to Cornell, the academic requirements there are properly more rigid than most D I schools. Could you talk about trying to balance that, and also could you also address the idea of who is actually the smartest guy in the household for you guys? JEFF FOOTE: Well, we had a tremendous ride in. The police escort was fun. I think we're a very good team, a very capable team. It's really anybody's game, and we're looking forward to it. LOUIS DALE: Yeah, so basically -- I'll just cover for Jeff real quick. I think that balancing the academics along with basketball, you know, I think it's like -- as far as being an Ivy League school, it's a little more difficult I would say, just because the expectations academically are there. But I think we find a way to balance it out pretty well, just time management, focusing on that. And far as the smartest guy in the house, I would say Mark Coury would be pretty smart. He's not the -- never mind. That's good. Q. Can anybody else be in the top three? RYAN WITTMAN: Well, I mean, besides myself, probably Eitan Chemerinski, probably a pretty smart guy. I don't know if you guys saw him do the Rubik's cube in about two and a half minutes. I don't know if all of us could pull that off. Q. Ryan, this is a senior team, and this is actually your last shot at this thing. I was just curious as to the sense of urgency, the sense of anticipation to go out here and play this game. RYAN WITTMAN: Yeah, obviously we have a lot of seniors on our team. You know, we have been here before, and I think that's something that kind of motivated us. You know, not only throughout the season, but in the off-season, as well, just knowing that this was our last shot to be able to come here and make some noise and win some games. Q. So not that you guys have been here for three years in a row, I mean, Cornell is known, and you guys get talked about. You've been talked about as like a Cinderella type team. How do you stay focused despite all of this national attention, and has it been kind of a challenge to do that? And a related question, you probably heard that Obama actually picked you guys to advance tomorrow, and I'm wondering if any of you have any thoughts on that. JON JAQUES: As for President Obama, that's nice. I guess he picked UNC last year to win. It doesn't really mean anything for us, but it's kind of cool to see on SportsCenter, though. As for Cornell becoming a basketball school and all the increasing attention that comes with it, our mindset doesn't really change. Every day in practice we kind of keep the same mentality, just work hard. We still have a ton to prove, obviously. We've been to the tournament twice and haven't won a game yet. So I still think that keeps us pretty motivated. We know we're a talented team, and at the same time we still have a lot to prove. In order to do that, we have to still keep working hard in practice every day. JEFF FOOTE: It was pretty cool to see Obama pick us. I guess Jon said most of it. With the increased attention of becoming a basketball school, especially Cornell, which has been mostly hockey and LaCrosse, it's exciting to see all that kind of change in front of us. That's been tremendous. Q. For Jon and Jeff, what areas -- after watching film all week, what areas does Lavoy Allen have his greatest impact for Temple and what he means to that team and what you guys will have to do against him on Friday. JON JAQUES: Just from watching film and from what Coach Donahue has said, he seems like a great passing man. He puts up great numbers on obviously points and rebounds, but he's a tremendous passer, as well. He's always looking to find his teammates, so I think that's something we have to focus on. He's obviously a great scorer, but we can't forget about his teammates behind them, so we'll look for them to score, as well. JEFF FOOTE: I think he does a tremendous job, especially on the offensive rebounding. He pushes guys right under the basket and gets the easy ones. I think that's a big key to his game. Like Jon said, he's a great passer, so it makes it really hard to double-team him, and Temple does a great job with their spacing on offense. So once they're spaced out, it makes it a lot easier to pass, and he does a great job of finding his teammates. Q. Does he remind you of anyone you guys have seen this year or last year? JEFF FOOTE: The passing aspect, I guess myself a little bit. But he's a big -- he's a good athlete, a little bit like Justin Burrell from St. John's in that aspect. He's got a great athleticism. He's a tremendous rebounder and a tough offensive threat. You know, he's very tough on defense, as well, just like Burrell was. Q. Your coach has a long-standing relationship with Fran Dunphy. I was just wondering, maybe Ryan, have you noticed anything different about your coach this week because of that? Has he talked about that at all, or has he managed to put it aside do you think? RYAN WITTMAN: He did mention it to us for a couple minutes, just kind of said how obviously they had a relationship coaching together for ten years, and they still stay in touch. You know, it doesn't really affect us, which it doesn't. It doesn't affect us as players. It's not going to affect the Temple players, either. It's probably going to be pretty weird for them for at least a little bit, but once the game against going, it should be pretty normal. Q. You guys spoke after the selection show that you really haven't seen a lot of the team. Now I'm guessing you've seen plenty of Temple. What do you think of them overall, and if you could also elaborate on obviously how well your coaches know each other that this thing is just going to be about basketball when you get it tipped off? LOUIS DALE: Yeah, well, watching film on them and just kind of studying them over the course of this week, they're a great defensive team, just really active with their hands. They limit teams to one shot. As far as offense, they love to rub their offense pushing in transition when they get a chance, and offensive rebounds, and I think that's the key to them. As far as the coaches knowing each other, I don't really know how much it plays into it, but like Ryan said, it's not going to really affect us players that much. You know, we're really just going out there to compete and play hard. Q. Ryan, you've been the focal point of other teams' defenses all season, and of course that will be true tomorrow. I want to ask you how you've been dealing with that and what you think of this Temple defense. RYAN WITTMAN: Obviously Temple is a great defensive team. They're going to make any team work for their shots. As far as being a focal point, I don't know how much of that is necessarily true. I mean, we obviously have Jeff down low, who really is -- who we run or offense through a lot of the teams, a great passing big man. With him, the only guys on the team, we're such an unselfish team that I think it's hard for teams just focusing on one guy. We've been moving the ball really well lately. When we're playing our best that's what we're doing, it's not we're trying to get guys certain shots or anything. When we're playing our best offensively, that's how we're doing it, moving the ball and finding the open man. Q. What kind of measures do you make to slow down a guy like Juan Fernandez who's been playing at such a high level, especially as of late? JEFF FOOTE: I was going to give it to Louis. LOUIS DALE: Well, the thing about Juan is he's a great shooter, a great play maker, can take it off the dribble, so he's really versatile in that sense. You know, all you can really do is just play good team defense. I think we have to make sure that we focus in on him and that the team is ready to adjust and make defensive plays, because one guy -- you can't really guard a guy just coming off ball screens and coming off screens is hard. You have to have help from your team. So I think that's the main focus is team defense as far as stopping a guy like Juan Fernandez? Q. I know you guys have probably answered this question at other places, but whose idea was it for you guys to all get under the same room, and how has that whole experience been in terms of the advantages it may provide for you, the logistics of always being together? JON JAQUES: Well, I think as far as our class goes, when we were freshmen, Jeff was here before transferring to Cornell. We always kind of bonded as a freshman class, and it seemed natural to live together the following year. And then after we added Jeff and another transfer, Andre Wilkins, they fit in perfectly with us. Like I said before, you can't really force chemistry, it just kind of happens. So I think if other coaches around the country forced to do their teams to do that, it wouldn't work as well as it has at Cornell just because our chemistry has worked so well together naturally. We all get along. We all value the same things. We all enjoy doing the same things, that sort of thing. We lived in a different house a couple years ago, and the house was for sale and we had to move, so luckily there was a 14-bedroom house that just happened to be open, and we snagged it, and the rest is history, I guess. It's worked out pretty well. Q. How far from campus is this house? JON JAQUES: Like a five-minute walk, so it's really close. It's pretty close to the gym for practice, and even when it's snowing and 10 degrees outside it's still not that bad to get to class. Q. I just want you to comment, everybody knows what a great shooting team you guys are, but at the same time, the mentality of Temple appears to be anyway to key on the three-point shooters, and we know how good Jeff is, but make Jeff have to beat us and make sure they don't kill us from three-point range. I want to know what comments that you have in terms of the challenge you're ultimately facing against Temple. JEFF FOOTE: Well, as far as that goes, I think all year teams have tried to key off on us defensively and tried to make me beat them. I look forward to the challenge. It gives me a chance to see where I'm at as far as responding to that kind of challenge. You know, guys like Ryan and Jon and Louis, they can all knock down threes, and it's a quick way to lose. As far as I go, I'm a little bit slower, I guess, work the ball inside. But as far as that goes, I'm looking forward to the challenge, and it'll be fun. THE MODERATOR: Thank you for coming. Steve Donahue is the head coach for Cornell. Just an opening statement about being in the tournament. COACH DONAHUE: First thing I'd like to address is just the first question that Jeff foot -- this is what Ivy League kids think is fun, but he lost a shooting bet which he does after practice with Louis, and he had to answer the question wrong. They think that's funny in the Ivy League. And quite honestly that's about as bad as it gets, so I can live with a couple of goofy things like that. But don't misread that they don't have a great amount of excitement and respect for what's going on in this tournament, and we're really excited to be here representing Cornell and our Ivy League. Looking forward to playing a terrific basketball team in Temple. What they've accomplished this year I'm sure far exceeded everybody's expectations. We're excited about the opportunity to play for a third straight time and do better than we did the last couple times. Q. Obviously you probably studied film on the Temple season. What's your primary concern about them looking at film? Break them down for me. COACH DONAHUE: Well, let's look at personnel first. I think Fernandez is as good a point guard as there is in the country. Now, he doesn't necessarily always handle the balls as the point guard for Temple, but if he was in a system -- this is nothing against Dunphy and how he runs his stuff, if he was not in the Temple system you would see a kid that leads the nation in assists. He would do some things that were spectacular. I think he does it so crafty, he makes them so much better when they need a basket and then you throw in a kid like Lavoy Allen, astonishing he plays 35 minutes a game at that size and only has 77 team fouls on the year. I don't know if you guys realize that, the guy is a great defensive presence. You can play him because he doesn't get in foul trouble. He doesn't get fatigued, and obviously he doesn't foul, and a terrific all-around player. The other thing that concerns me is just the way they go about their business. There's no mistakes. They're not going to turn it over. They're not going to be out of position. They're going to make you shoot challenge jump shots, and if you make them, I think you've got a good chance of beating them. Q. I know a lot has been made of your relationship with Fran Dunphy, and I was wondering whether you might be able to see knowing him as an advantage, and if you could talk about that. COACH DONAHUE: I'm not sure if it's an advantage or not. I probably know his team better than he really knows mine, just because Temple is on TV more often. I obviously talked to a lot of people in Philadelphia. I probably watched half his games already. Even at the beginning of the season I was so impressed with Lavoy Allen, I asked Matt Langel to send me tapes of their earlier games just because of his defensive ability. I wanted to show our guys. Not knowing that we'd play each other in the NCAA tournament, but I think I know their team well. I don't know if that's advantage or not. I think our guys have got to take it in. I know we played similar teams like Temple this year. In years past we hadn't. I think defensively they're very similar to St. John's. They're physical. They don't let you get in the lane. They make you shoot challenge shots. Obviously we played our teams in that league. I think that's more beneficial to us than me knowing Fran and what he's trying to accomplish. Q. I think you're one of seven coaches from Philly in the tournament, which is not really an unusual number. What is it about the city that breeds coaches? COACH DONAHUE: Well, that's obviously one close to my heart. It's hard to explain. Growing up in Philadelphia, I think the Palestra is the first thing that grabs you if you're a sports person, in particular basketball, and that was what grabbed me, just the whole sense of what goes on in that building, and then all the coaches back then, Jimmy Lynam, Jim Boyle, Jack McKinney, Chuck Daly, Rollie Massimino, and I think we have a close bond with each other even now with all the guys in the tournament, even a guy like Bo Ryan, I think we all feel close that he has Philadelphia roots. I feel great pride that I'm in that group. You can't give me a better compliment than to say I'm a Philadelphia guy who came from Philadelphia and coached the way they coach, whatever that is. I think Dunph is obviously the pinnacle of what a Philadelphia coach is, tough, single-minded, not a lot of sizzle, it's just about the game, there's not a lot of self-promoting. I think that's a great compliment. If someone considers me in that group, I'd take that as the ultimate compliment. Q. Ryan Wittman, you obviously liked him because you brought him in. Has he exceeded your expectations, and what do you think he has improved on the most in these three years or four years at Cornell? COACH DONAHUE: I think you've got to realize, for us to get the finished product that Ryan Wittman is now, he probably wasn't that when all the schools were looking at him as a junior in high school at the age of 17. There's a couple things that were key in our fortunate ability to get him. One, he was young for his grade, so he's a young kid. He was 16 in that summer going into his senior year. He had a deep thigh bruise that didn't enable him to play very well in that summer. So I don't think there was a lot of schools interested in him. He was about 6'4", 180, all right, by the time he walked onto campus, he gained a couple inches, put on some weight, and every year there's no one more dedicated to his body, to his game, than him. Now you're looking at a kid who's close to 6'7", 220, very good athlete. I think he's a little more athletic than people think. He just doesn't play to 99 percent of his athleticism, he plays to 80. He's intelligent. His ability to get shots, now how to get shots, makes him really, really special. I've never been around a kid who shoots it like him that wants it all the time. He just wants that ball and has tremendous confidence. And he's obviously -- this is another big hurdle for him. He wants to play well in the NCAA tournament. That's another thing that he feels he needs to do in his career. Q. Could you give us a report on how is Tyler's calf? COACH DONAHUE: He was our starting forward, and he has a ton of injuries this year in terms of his injuries, and his latest is a calf. He has not practiced in two weeks he has done some things dry. I think we're going to get him in today. I think he's a guy we can use in spurts hopefully over this weekend. He's another big body that we could use, and if I can tough on Alex Tyler, I know we talked about Jon Jaques and what he's meant to our program but the real special guy is Alex Tyler, a three-year starter that has accepted his role better than you could ever imagine. At other basketball programs that blows up your locker room. A kid that starts for three years and the head coach takes him out of the lineup due to an injury and he doesn't get himself back into that lineup. Not only has he accepted it, he's embraced it because he's seen what our team has done. I'm sure deep down he's very disappointed that personally his senior year didn't turn out like this, but I can't tell you how much respect his teammates have for what he's done for our team in accepting that. Q. What are some differences with this club compared to the ones that you brought here in recent years? COACH DONAHUE: I think there's some substantial difference. Even though the core is the same, they're two years older from our 14-0 team that went against Stanford. I'll start with Jeff Foote. When he played as a sophomore, he weighed 212. He's up to 265, just a physical presence now. Even the teams we played this year, they had difficult times with him. Everybody, even Kansas, I thought Cole Aldrich had his hands full with him, let alone Alabama and St. John's. They all had difficulty. He's as good as there is in getting positioned down there and making himself an option, and we never had that before this season. We added Mark Coury who started 32 games for Kentucky at the power forward spot, another big body that comes in, knows how to play, 2 to 1 assist to turnover for a big guy. We were able to -- Jon Jaques makes us a better basketball team, another guy to stretch the defense on a team that shots the ball from the three. He's our leading shooter at the fourth spot. We never had that option. Now we have Alex Tyler off the bench. The last piece of that, we started Geoff Reeves last year who is a terrific player for us. He's now made our bench much deeper. We're able to start Chris Wroblewski who's a very good guard, makes plays for others. Now you have Geoff Reeves at 6'5", very athletic, can use his energy to guard people and he's accepted his role and made us a better basketball team. Q. You guys have played grind 'em out games with Princeton in the league this year, played that slow pace. Coming into this game does it help you that you've been successful in those games in the past? COACH DONAHUE: I really do. I know people don't understand what our league is about sometimes, but our preseason was great. It helped us. I think St. John's game in particular, we fall down by 13 against a team like that at The Garden, and they're shooting the ball well, and we figure out a way to get it done. But the Princeton games were as physical as games as we played. They're a big team. It's not what people think if they haven't seen Princeton. They make you guard, they're grinding it out, they're fouling you. I thought those two games, the mentality is going to be more similar to this game than any game we played. We won games 48-44 and 51-48. I thought they were well played basketball games that we figured out a way to win, and we're going to have to do that against Temple. That's the way it's going to be. Q. You may have already answered this, but I want to ask you about your preference, your tempo preference in this game. What would you like the tempo to be, or does it matter? COACH DONAHUE: I don't think I have a choice in it. We're going to play fast. We like to play fast, push it up. Unfortunately you have to have two people, two teams participate in that, and we realize that. If we have a good shot early on the shot clock, that's what we do. We shoot the basketball, and I have great confidence. If the team guards us, which Temple will, they have great floor balance, they've put three guys back most of the time. You're not going to get early offense. But it doesn't stop you from playing fast. We've got to make them guard us, chase us, move our bodies, move the basketball to get a good shot, whenever that is on the shot clock. Q. Can you just talk about what you just talked about to follow up on that, in terms of per possession how much more premium each possession is because Temple takes care of the ball so well and what you just talked about? COACH DONAHUE: Temple is going to guard you. They're not a team that traps you. They're not a team that presses you, so you're not going to get like a 2 on 1 out of the sets, which a lot of teams do. A lot of teams will test you. And our guys understand that. That's why I was going back to the Princeton thing. Early in the shot clock they're going to be guarding us so now there's another 20 or so seconds that you really -- I think the mistake teams make against Temple is they get in that mode of just kind of, all right, this is going to be a slow game, just move our bodies, move the ball, late in the shot clock, here we go. I don't want to do that, either. I want us to really work hard for a good, quick shot, because I think as the shot clock goes along, I think Temple is better. I think they're more physical, they understand that better. Not that it's going to be that way sometimes, but I'd rather work us into that 20 seconds really hard to get us a good shot. That's what we've done all season against whoever we played, and we're going to try to do that against Temple. End of FastScripts |
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