MBI QUOTES – Murray State 88, Texas A&M 79

Murray State Coach Steve Prohm – “It’s a terrific win. I’m really happy for our players and staff. They did a terrific job preparing these guys. We’re trying to set the foundation. This program has been so good for so long, but we do have brand-new guys. We do have some pieces to make a good puzzle at the end of the day if we build our foundation the right way. This was a great test to go against Coach Williams. He’s such a good coach, they’re so physical and so tough. To win it you’ve got to match it play after play. When they cut it to 60-58, our guys showed a lot of toughness and character to go on a 10-2 run to go ahead 70-60. Now we’ve got to understand this is game three in a 30-game regular season. Can we flip the script because you’re going to have be that tough, that fundamentally sound tomorrow against a Frank Martin team.

Murray State guard Rob Perry – “Our team showed tremendous character. We hung our hats this week on competing and working hard. We’ve still got more to go. That was the first stepping stone of the foundation we’re building and the farther we go, the more we buy in and it’s all correlating to winning. Basketball is a game of runs but our coach told us how are we going to handle adversity. We’ve been down before, we just had to handle adversity well and come back swinging.” (On playing seven players): “Man, it’s kind of tough, but then again, we’re the old guys, the older seven but we’ve got to have some leadership for those freshmen and know when their jersey number is called, they’ll be ready. But tonight was about toughness from the start.”

Texas A&M Coach Buzz Williams – “I thought they had more energy from start to finish, particularly in the first 10 minutes. We were trying to find our footing, never got it and in many respects, that was the difference in the game. We didn’t have a presence on the glass, we shot a very low percentage collectively as a team at the rim. I don’t think we contested shots at the rim or from the perimeter the way that we do. They gained confidence from that. We shot 47 percent at the rim, that’s a really low number. They shot 65 percent at the rim; that’s a very high number If you only look at the stat sheet, there are a lot of good things that we did. We shot 21 more shots than they did, we got 20 offensive rebounds. What makes the loss so disappointing, I never want to discredit Coach Prohm or any coach. The things we can control from start to finish, we didn’t meet the standard at which we want.”

Texas A&M guard Tyrece Radford – “Basketball is a game of runs. I feel like we started to be ourselves at a point in the game but we didn’t start off being ourselves and that’s something we have to better as a team.”