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NCAA MEN'S 2ND & 3RD ROUNDS: WASHINGTONMarch 16, 2011Ed BiedenbachMatt DickeyJ.P. PrimmChris StephensonWASHINGTON, D.C. MODERATOR: We'll open it up for questions for the student-athletes from UNC-Ashville. Q. This is for all three players: Can you just talk about what the last 20 hours has been like as far as text messages, watching highlights, just the overall experience from coming back last night? MATT DICKEY: It's been a little overwhelming in a way, but it's been fun. It's an exciting experience, and it's a blessing to be here and to have this opportunity. It's not every day that a small school get to be on CBS or on TV and SportsCenter and stuff. So it's cool to get to have that opportunity. J.P. PRIMM: It's a great feeling, similar to what Matt said. The calls that we've been getting is family members and friends from all over has been calling and texting, patting you on the back, "good job." But the thing is about our team, I think -- actually I know that we're not satisfied. So we're going to continue to try to do well and hopefully we'll keep on going. CHRIS STEPHENSON: To add on what Matt and J.P. said, the phone calls and text messages have been coming and it's amazing to see how many people support you and where your support comes from around the world. Before we came over here, I was sitting in a room with Q and we were watching Sports Nation, and it was amazing to see Matt on the first chair, when he hit that step-back three in the corner and just see everybody on the bench and on the court celebrating and getting crazy, and then in the same breath he turns around and I think he slips on a tear. And they showed it about three or four times but even still, though, you get the good publicity and the bad publicity. Q. Guys I know you're aware that a 16 has never beaten a 1, and it's probably challenging when somebody says you can't do something, but what do you guys think about that opportunity? This is something you guys could pull off and really make history. MATT DICKEY: You said people give us a one-in-a-million chance, I think it's a one-in-a-million opportunity. Not many people get to do this and we have a chance to make history, and people say 16 over 1 has never happened. Well, it hasn't happened and there's a first time for everything. So hopefully tomorrow we can do something good. J.P. PRIMM: I look at it as I really don't look at it as 16 playing a 1, and the guys, we see it as another game. We're going to prepare the same way we did when we played a Division II team and nothing is going to change. Even though Pitt is a really, really good team and we have to play real well, but hopefully like Jalen Rose said on the Fab Five, hopefully we can shock the world. So definitely. CHRIS STEPHENSON: Matt and J.P. pretty much summed it up for me. It's just we gotta go out and we just gotta play together as a team. When we came in there last night, it was just us on the floor. We had a little bit of fan base, but it was us and those black jerseys and we got to stay together. We gotta win these four-minute segments. So one in a million, 1 in 16 doesn't really matter to me. I think we're going to do pretty well. Q. I'm sure it's been a fun whirlwind flying to Dayton and the celebration flying here, but it's hardly the ideal way you'd design preparing for a game, especially for a team like Pitt. How much can you even concentrate on Pitt or how much of it is you just guys just gotta play whatever game you can play because you've had so little time to prepare for this? MATT DICKEY: We definitely had a little time to prepare for both teams. We found out Sunday night we were planning Arkansas Little Rock, get on the plane Monday morning and we're just trying to scout and get as much preparation as we can and kind of what we're doing for Pitt, almost the same thing. We'll just have to stay focused and whatever the coach is telling us, just get ready and practice. Main thing is just staying focused not letting all the hype about the game get to you. Just staying focused and getting read for Pitt. J.P. PRIMM: Similar to what Matt said. It's really a great thing, and really the less time you have to prepare for a team, when you get into Tournament time it's like up a little time to prepare for them, but at the end of the night we're going to have to stop McGhee and Wanamaker and Gibbs. They're tough players and at the end of the day you're gonna have to play defense and man-to-man and stop the personnel. CHRIS STEPHENSON: Of course it's always going to be a quick turnaround, playing Arkansas and now playing Pitt. But it just showcases our coaching staff's ability to put things together and show us what we need to do and strategize so we can give ourselves a better chance. Luckily we've seen Pitt play on TV, so we kind of have some idea of what they look like and what they might and might not do. So I just give the credit to the coaching staff. Q. This is for J.P.: You touched on it there but when did you guys leave Dayton? When did you arrive here? What's like the last 18 hours since that game been like? J.P. PRIMM: Like Matt said, it's been hectic. We played Arkansas Little Rock, we leave maybe 20 minutes, we head to the airport, we get on a plane, we get to DC around two or three o'clock in the morning, we got to sleep during a little bit but today we were right back at it. And like I keep on saying, it feels presidential. It's a great feeling, it really is. Q. Matt, in particular, what do you make of your new-found celebrity from the buzzer beater, regular season obviously everyone enjoyed and obviously the big shot in the conference championship and then last night. How do you keep your head from growing this large? MATT DICKEY: Just staying humble and just always being thankful for the opportunity that I have and et cetera. Like you said, it's been such an almost overwhelming experience. This past year. It's been fun. I want to keep it going and hopefully tomorrow night we can pull off a big upset and that would definitely be -- I think that would top everything. MODERATOR: Other questions? All right, guys. Thank you. We're joined by UNC-Ashville Head Coach Eddie Biedenbach. Coach, if you could, talk about your logistics and your travel plans and probably in the last 24 hours before you open it up. COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: You mean what we've just done or what we're about to do? MODERATOR: What you've just done. COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Yeah, I was really pleased. Our players have played well enough to battle our way to a conference championship and get into the NCAA Tournament. Nothing could be more exciting than that, and they deserve all the credit. You know, a lot of people say, "You did such a great job." Well, I coached the same way last year and the year before and we didn't get there. But those guys particularly Matt Dickey and J.P. Primm have been tremendous leaders. Oddly enough our two seniors, John Williams and Eric Stubbs, have also done a good job, and Stubbs particularly since Christmas. But I'm pleased those guys have all kind of brought the team together to where we're a pretty good basketball team. We have good players, and we play hard, and I give the credit to those guys particularly Primm and Dickey that started us in that direction. And then through some great defensive deals that everybody has every year, John Williams started to excel in more than just a shot blocker as a defensive player, and build his stamina, and it just evolved over the period of the season. Then another guy picked up and another guy and pretty soon we had a defensive team and one that could play offense or could play a little bit of zone and could play a little bit of man-to-man offensively as well. And we got to the point, we had a couple ups and downs where I used the term "50 cent millionaires," they win a couple of games and think they've done something and then get beat by somebody perhaps we shouldn't have. But overall we finally put it together later in the season, and have won seven games now and all of them. Our guys don't have much quit in them, and they really lay it on the line. Whatever it takes, sometimes it's shooting, sometimes defense, sometimes diving on the floor, but they're playing together and they're playing hard and they're fun to coach and fun to watch. So hopefully we can continue that. MODERATOR: Question for Coach? Q. Eddie, what is your memory of Western Purdue, I guess it was' 95, closest to 16 -- do you remember watching the game? Do you remember having any specific thoughts on that? And just as a follow-up, obviously it's never been done, how realistic is it this team plays well, you can be the first to do that? COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Well, I said to our players, you know, you can do something that no one's done before. You can do something for UNC-Ashville and for yourself as a team for you individually and as a team that people haven't done before, and you can do something that's really, really special. But it's going to take a better play than you've had. If I can kind of emphasize how -- this is how good we could get this year. We've gotten to there but this next game is there, and they can take a little and say, hey, we've been conference champions, we've had a great year and just have a good time here in DC, go see the capital and play, and nobody would say anything about it. Or next year when you start again, we lose two seniors but we'll start down here and we'll try to get back to that place again. We're right there. You can just lay it on the line and do everything you've got and see if you can take this team to another step. And I think we can. I think those guys, I think we can be a little bit better. Do we have to play perfect to beat a No. 1 seed? I don't know. I know that we can have perfect attitude, perfect effort. And I read a book one time, some of the writers out here are golfers, but it says golf is not a game of perfect. Well, neither is basketball, that's why they have turnovers and fouls and those things. So we're going to make some mistakes out there. We're going to do some things. We shouldn't miss some shots and stuff, but put those things in proper perspective and let's see if we can win a big game here. Q. Do you have any memory of the Western Purdue game? COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Does that one -- I was thinking of -- remind me of it? Q. Purdue won by two. They had a shot at the buzzer and missed it was a knife. COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: I remember Maryland was playing somebody and had the shot out of the corner. Who was that? I'm sorry. Q. That's all right. I'll ask you about a game I know you remember, the '74 Elite Eight game, NC State you were an assistant against Pitt. Can you talk about that and also Coach Dixon said you reached out to him when he got hired, and what are your impressions of him as a coach? COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Well, I'll start with him. I think he's fantastic he's done a tremendous job at Pitt. A lot of people -- we used to have a lot of talent in Pittsburgh and there's some there now but it's not as much as there used to be Jack Marin and Willie Somerset and Brian Generalovich and all those great players came through at one time or another. But he's gone out and done a great job -- to do a good job in the Big East you have to be able to go against some of the best coaches in the country and beat them, and then you have to go out in the court and really coach. You have to be a great coach and go and beat them on the court. So he's done a fantastic job. I like his attitude towards people and towards his team. I think that's also a special gift that he has. The '74 game against Pitt is when David Thompson got hurt, and me being from Pittsburgh I was recruited by Pitt. I liked Pitt. I chose between North Carolina State and Pitt. And that game was fantastic game. I probably am not allowed to talk about officials here, am I? Q. Probably not. COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Well, there was a couple of calls missed in that game which I know the other ones -- Q. They're all dead. COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Well, they should be -- no, that's all right. But in that particular game David Thompson took a shot and he was hit on the arm hard, and NCAA games get a little more physical than most, and that game was physical and he got hit and he took about a eight, nine-foot shot and it went about four feet because the guy hit him and he was frustrated. They took off the other end and he took off and he was going to do something. The look in his eye was wild. And he took off on top of the key, took a step and went up and that guy from Pitt took like a little 45 degree shot, and went and knocked that thing out of the air. But he caught his knee and foot on Phil Spencer's shoulder, who is about a 6'9" guy and he went headfirst in. That was a terrifying moment. That was the quietest I ever heard of the Coliseum, going from roaring down to nothing. But I remember David coming back into the arena in the second half, and guys were crying during the huddles and then go out and play and then they'd come back and cry in there and won the game. Billy Knight played for that Pitt team and he was a great player. We recruited him hard at NC State and tried to get him to come, but he ended up at Pitt and then a great player with the Indiana Pacers. I remember a lot about that game. Is there something specific you wanted to know? There was a lot more about that. I remember I spoke to a Rotary club, just something quick, in Pittsburgh, my brother's club and one of the guys was from Pitt there, who was from my high school, and not a big Pitt guy maybe, but he said that we brought David Thompson back from the hospital, which was not a smart thing to do to rally the crowd, you know. He came back because he wanted to show the guys he was all right. And that was a great time. It was a great run in '74. I learned a lot of basketball during that time. When you play Maryland, beat Maryland ten straight times in North Carolina, nine straight times and all the games were like four, five points. But watching how those games were played and won, you really start to understand basketball and how to win at a high level. Thanks for that question. I'm sure the rest of you weren't really interested in that. Q. Coach, all the teams here are basically had the same travel schedule, four, five days, practice, looked at tape. Are you guys the exception here? I guess the question is how, do you turn that to an advantage that you guys are the most recently played team? COACH EDDIE BIEDENBACH: Well, I don't know if people say rest or rust. It's simple as that. You play the game and you got some of the nervousness out and you get banged around and sometimes you can think too much and as coaches you can coach too much. I listened to the guys on TV and they talk about in the first round it's players and then you start coaching. I don't know, I coach too much I guess. But I think the last two weeks of the season, three weeks of the season we played a bracket-buster game and played on Tuesday and then we played like seven games in 14 days. Six games in two weeks. We played Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And Saturday game was against Coastal Carolina in the conference championship, and we had to drive like we came from Dayton to here. This was a cakewalk. One of the players said, J.P. Primm, like he was presidential and then we have motorcycle escorts coming over here, moving traffic, you know. I was more nervous here than I've been on the bench all year. But to travel down to Coastal and back and travel and two Tuesdays in a row to Charleston and play those games, our players were really tired on Sunday. They gave them two days off and then practiced on Tuesday, gave them Sunday and Monday off and practiced on Tuesday. We were bad. And I'm saying, oh, they must be rested. I don't know. Getting back into the flow of things our guys -- we didn't know who they were going to play, we're going to practice hard to play X team. Kids are kids. They want something to look at there. They want somebody to go against. So I suggested they look out there as if Michael Jordan was there guarding him a little bit. But seriously, though, playing in Dayton was great in the play-in game -- the First Four they call it now. I congratulate the guy that came up with the terminology. I think I met him out there. I can't remember his name right now, but about four years ago he patented the term and then they have brought it out. I wonder if he got some money for that. But anyway to play there, it's an honor to be in the NCAA Tournament. My wife kind of shudders when I say this, I've said it to a couple of people that I have called, we're not one of the top 68 teams in the country. She says, "You shouldn't say that. You should figure out a way to be clever on that." And we aren't. And we don't try to say we're somebody we're not. But we're pretty good. And we can beat a lot of the teams in the country. Can we win six in a row to win a national championship? We can dream. I love Jim Valvano and the way he dreamed and coached from that side of it. But there's only a few teams that can win six in a row. The NCAA tournament if they wanted to pick a true national champion they'd have at the most eight or 12 teams in it. The rest of them it's gravy for those folks. They have no chance of being ranked No. 1 all season long. We might have had the most this year of any year up in that position but there's several teams that are really good. Ohio State is really good. Kansas is really good. The other guys in there, Duke and Pitt and Texas, they're really good. Those guys are tough. And then you get down there out of the USA Today top 25 and those other guys there, there's some really good teams in there. But teams that can challenge for a national championship winning six in a row? Not many. And these guys I've said before, I listened to John Wooden and we talked about Final Four several times about include everybody. He's from Indiana. Put everybody in the tournament, so one more weekend. And somebody came up with have 96, 32 play 32 and the top 32 they get byes and then let them go to the 64. I think that's a pretty neat idea too. But if you did, the 97, 98, 99 and 100, Seth Greenberg would be in there. (Laughter.) He'd be one of those teams and there will be complaining. There would be somebody out there, I don't know who it would be. But to complain if you're not the top 12, then you should be happy as heck to get in the NCAA Tournament. This is fantastic. All over the country people playing in front of thousands of people on ESPN and national TV, I woke up this morning saw my own face on TV. We played the first game. I hadn't been on TV in since the Mickey Mouse Club. But it's great. The Tournament is great, the fact we played Tuesday and have to play tomorrow, these are young kids. There will be some guys and maybe leg weary, shouldn't be tomorrow. I hope to heck we get leg weary on Saturday. I mean, I'd die to be leg weary on Saturday. MODERATOR: All right, Coach. You're all set. Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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