MBI QUOTES – Colorado 103, Texas A&M 75

Colorado Coach Tad Boyle – “Look, I told the team afterward in the locker room ‘Great bounceback win, but I’m tired of bounceback wins.’ We wanted to start building on wins yet this year. I believe in every single one of the guys on our team or they wouldn’t be in a Colorado uniform. Whoever we play (Sunday) is good. The four teams in the losers side of this tournament – we all have at-large hopes and we want to play in the NCAA Tournament and these games matter. Every time we step on the floor, it’s an opportunity to prove ourselves on a national stage. If we put offense and defense together, you’ll see a night like this. KJ (Simpson) is a special talent, we all know that, his teammates know that, the coaching staff knows that. It’s just about channeling that and tonight if I think of KJ’s game tonight, it’s efficiency.”

Colorado guard KJ Simpson – “I feel like one thing we’re good at, you never want to lose two in a row. Obviously you want to win every game but that’s a really a big key. At this point, we don’t want to learn that way. We want to be consistent and play the same way no matter the competition. We handled adversity well. I took a long time watching the film and I’m pretty sure everyone else did too. When UMass pressured us, we all just scattered. We couldn’t handle their pressure well coming out into the second. Today we faced kind of the same pressure but we didn’t scatter around, we didn’t go crazy. We just kept playing at our pace, playing under control. When we play under control, it’s going to be heard to beat us.”

Colorado guard Javon Ruffin – “It all came down to defense. We guarded, we didn’t let them get anything easy, we still need to do better on the ‘O’ boards but we’re not letting them get easy shots. We kept sharing the ball so we got open shots and no one had to force today. Our energy on offense and defense was way different.”

Texas A&M Coach Buzz Williams – “They did great. We had not near enough competitive character. We gave up 88 points yesterday, Murray State shot 50 percent from the field. Today 103 points, Colorado shot 58 percent from the field. What we want to be about and what we want our identity to be about and what we’ve practiced before we came here has not been evident since we’ve been here. I don’t have the answer, I understand I’m responsible for trying to figure out that answer and will be held accountable. The tenets on what our defense is built on, we haven’t executed at any level since we’ve been here. We need our defense to help our offense and we’ve been doing it or trying to do it in an inverse way. At this level that won’t work. Whether there is defense or not, to shoot 58 percent from the field and 50 percent from 3, whatever level of defense that would be considered, it’s not near good enough.”