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MISSOURI VALLEY CONFERENCE MEN'S TOURNAMENTMarch 1, 2012Gregg MarshallToure' MurryJoe RaglandGarrett StutzST. LOUIS, MISSOURI THE MODERATOR: Questions for Coach. COACH MARSHALL: Coach Marshall. Just happy to be here and flanked by these gentlemen. Looking forward to getting back to playing. Q. When your team has played so well, do you prepare or how much do you think about the chance that a team is going to come in and maybe break character and play a box and one or do something different to get you guys out of your comfort zone? COACH MARSHALL: We're prepared for anything. The stuff that we can run, a lot of it works against man, a lot of it works against zone, a lot of it works against both. To be honest with you, I wasn't thinking Illinois State in the next to last game of the season would have started in the zone, but as you saw, that didn't deter these guys. They quickly got into a zone offense, and knocked down two or three shots. I think it was 10‑2 before they called time out and abandoned the zone. You've just got to be prepared for anything at this point. But like I started the whole thing, I'm just glad I'm flanked by these guys, because they're veterans and I don't think you can surprise them too much. Q. Could you give us an update on your team's help at this point? COACH MARSHALL: It's an honor to be named "Coach of the Year", and that just means we've got the best players and the coaching staff that accumulated that type talent. Certainly wasn't "Coach of the Year" five years ago when we started this journey, but these guys can make you look really good. But it's a nice honor, and it's one that we've worked really hard for. Not for the award, but just to be the regular season champion. I think that kind of goes along with being the regular season champion. The other question was the health. Joe seems to be better. Garrett seems to be almost all the way better. You can ask them. David Kyles is the last guy that came down with something, and he's here, ready to practice. No one right now is 100% healthy in college basketball. If they are, they probably don't play very much. We're all fighting through some illness and being banged up and whatnot. But I'm pretty sure they'll all answer the bell and we're excited to be here. Q. Toure' and Garrett, and if Joe wants to pipe in on this too. Can you talk about your memories of this event, especially for Garrett as a senior. It's kind of a roller coaster to get here. This seemed like a team on a mission all year long, but some of the memories in this building have been bittersweet especially for the seniors who have been through so much in St. Louis. Garrett, Toure' second, please. GARRETT STUTZ: Yeah, me and Toure' have been here, this is our fourth year. So we have a lot of good memories and a lot of bad memories. We hope to go make some new memories this year, and hopefully they'll all turn out in our favor. TOURE' MURRY: Getting to the championship my sophomore year was a great accomplishment, but we failed to reach our goal. This year we're looking forward to making it count our senior year and going out with a bang. JOE RAGLAND: I just played one year here and it wasn't a successful year. So we're looking forward to coming back this year and trying to finish the unfinished business that we didn't finish last year. Q. Given what is perceived as a basic likelihood and almost positive certainty that you'll be playing in March. Does this have any sort of different feeling coming into this tournament than it has for you coming into the past years where you were playing for a tournament berth? It seems this year you have one already? COACH MARSHALL: Not in terms of how much we're going to prepare and how hard we're going to play and how much we want to win the tournament. There is a different feel that it's different from the perspective of knowing that not only are you going to be playing in postseason, but more than likely with all certainty the NCAA Tournament. That's a nice feeling. It's comforting. It's also nice to know that you're coming in as a regular season champion. That's a little different feeling as well because you probably are favored to win it more than any other single team. But that doesn't alter the fact of what we're going to try to do. It's three games. You've got to win the first one to get to the second one, and on down the road. We never got to the championship game last year because Indiana State was playing very well. You know, they took it to us the last 28, 30 minutes of that game. So that's, I'm sure what these gentlemen here, it's fresh in their mind, and we've got to play one game at a time, one possession at a time, one four‑minute segment at a time. If we do that, we have a pretty good chance. Q. Gregg, most people talk about Doug when they mention Creighton. What other weapons does Creighton have? COACH MARSHALL: They shoot it well. Manigat and Antoine Young is a very talented point guard. Echenique, his presence, his size, and his ability to score around the basket. They've got a deep, well‑rounded team. Coach McDermott does a great job with them, and I don't think they're a one‑man team at all. Q. Garrett, how are you feeling? GARRETT STUTZ: I'm feeling much better than a couple days ago. Got a lot of rest, thanks to the team doctor. He's been doing a great job getting the medication I need, and the coach has helped me out with resting me in situations where I don't need to participate in practice. So I'm feeling a lot better. Q. What was wrong? GARRETT STUTZ: Basically it's the flu, I guess. Couple days I was under the weather and really feeling miserable. And most of it is out of my system and already passed. Q. Gregg, again, this afternoon when you got the "Coach of the Year" trophy, you talked about five years ago and the start of this journey. I remember your first tournament game here you were ejected and there had been some controversial moment that's you've been a part of, and good moments you've been a part of here. Can you reflect on that journey to this point personally as a coach in this event? COACH MARSHALL: The first year, obviously said something to the officials walking off at halftime, and I got kicked out without saying a word. I he was making a call, I was turning away from the referee, and he turns and sees me out of the corner of his eye. I got the first technical for yelling foul. The second one, they had it in. They knew what their plans were at halftime. In fact, I've heard since then that they discussed it and plotted it. I probably deserved it, but I didn't curve them or anything in the first half. I was just trying to beg for every foul called because we needed it. We certainly needed every break. It wasn't the first time I've been tossed, and probably not the last. Second year we went in the first round, and still in the Thursday deal, and we had 1.9. Since then we've improved our clock management. We've gone to a much more accurate system. Maybe that game was the cause of that. I'm pretty sure it was. Those are great moments. I'm glad you brought that up. Let's see. The next year, boy, going down memory lane here. Arguably the second best team. We lose late in the year to Northern Iowa, and they win the regular season. Then we meet them again in the finals. We won a couple of games. Missouri State, Illinois State, and then play a very good Northern Iowa team in the finals. Actually, several minutes into the second half we're leading by a handful of or, as I recall, and then they just defended us great. We didn't make a shot for about eight minutes, and they ended up winning by seven or eight, maybe 10. So that was tough. These guys are sophomores. Then last year, we came out like gang Busters. Win the first game, played well for the first 10 or 12 minutes of the Indiana State game in the semis, and then just, again, went cold and ran into a very hot team with a very hot player. So we've lost now four years in a row in a every conceivable way, and every conceivable round. So there are no other ways to lose. There is only one way to win, and that's the only thing we haven't done. Q. (Inaudible)? COACH MARSHALL: Would it mean more to me personally? Q. Yeah, given the four years. COACH MARSHALL: You know, I want to win no matter what. We roll some dice out back; I want to beat you. That doesn't have any bearing on it. I want to win with these guys. I want to see these guys hold up that trophy on Sunday on CBS. They're certainly capable of doing that. We've come this far. We've played this well. Those guys will continue doing what we're doing. If we do that, the chips will fall where they may. It very well could happen. If we don't, then we'll run into another hot team, and it won't. Q. You obviously had some carryover from last year to this year. But can you pinpoint a game or a series of games at some point where this team went from being very good to being really formidable and what is really become a dominating team? COACH MARSHALL: I think it was the Nebraska game last year. The first round of the NIT. We ended it here very disappointed. Thought we had as good a chance as Missouri State to win the whole thing. Then Indiana State trumps both of us. You can't ever take anyone in this league for granted. I think that's been proven. Not that we did that, but what we did we went back and decided to play in the NIT. It was a decision they made. I left it up it to them. I didn't want to go to the NIT unless we were trying to win it. If we were going to have a pity party and do it just because everyone else wanted to do it, I wasn't in favor of it. So they had a meeting and decided, and I wasn't sure how the meeting was going to go. They decided they wanted to win the NIT. I think we beat Nebraska by 27 or 28. We won the NIT by 15 points per game, and the international trip helped that. We didn't come out of the gate early on. Made a couple bad decisions and bad choices, and Alabama played better than us because they had the motivation factor of the rematch from the NIT championships. From that point guard, they decided to do this and be focused. Q. Garrett, could you speak to that from a player's perspective? Going into the NIT and that Nebraska game, and what the team talked about and said? GARRETT STUTZ: Obviously, none of us were happy with the way we ended our postseason conference tournament. A lot of guys said good and bad, we blew it. We should have won the conference tournament. We should have been going to the NCAA.  Some guys are still chomping at the bit and saying we should have gotten back out there. The feeling was we're not finished yet, and we didn't want to see our seniors go out that way: We wanted to go out and win, and that became a slogan for the NIT for our school is end on a win by winning the whole thing. COACH MARSHALL: Not too many teams get to do that, so it's a pretty good slogan. It's on our ring. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports |
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