MBI QUOTES – Texas A&M 67, Loyola Chicago 51

Texas A&M Coach Buzz Williams – “On Friday evening, our staff worked a lot and then Saturday morning, I met with each player for 25 minutes each. We watched defensive film of Thursday’s game and Friday’s game. We practiced for an hour and a half at a really good pace. This morning we had a really good shootaround. I taught them nine plays, they did a great job memorizing them. I’ve done a bad job the last three weeks. We’ve got good players who are better people. I’ve done a poor job as a leader. Over the last 36 hours we got back to what we’re supposed to be about. We forced 27 turnovers because we were better at what we’re supposed to be. We played better in practice than we did on Thursday and Friday. An expensive trip for Texas A&M athletics for us to stay on the beach for five nights and eat food that chefs made for us. We lived like kings and we played like we had very high egos and we can’t be that. Our response was better so if we’re going to spend all of that money, we need to make sure that in week 2 we learned a lesson and I should be the front of the lesson.” (On forward Andersson Garcia): “He’s sneaky good. Sometimes the sneakiness leads to taking him out of the play and doing undisciplined things. When he stays in what we want him to do slash what we do, he has a distinct role. When we stay within our role definition as a team and do individually what we know we can do, I think we’re pretty good.”

Texas A&M forward Julius Marble – “As Coach said, we have to get back to our identity. We had big egos coming into Myrtle Beach because of whatever was going on. Instead of focusing on what we need to do to get better we kind of strayed away from that and today we got back to who we are. Energy for sure. We have to have everyone engaged and focused on the job and the task at hand which is to win the game.”

Loyola Coach Drew Valentine – “It definitely didn’t go the way we wanted it to. Got to give the credit to A&M. Both teams were 0-2 and probably two of the teams that were projected to go farther in this tournament as far as a wins perspective. But those are only projections. They had errors that they made and somehow make up for them in other areas. With their press, we had a couple things we wanted to do with their press, you saw what happened when we executed those and the majority of it we didn’t execute. I’ve got to do a better job as a coach at getting our team prepared and ready to play. I’ve got to figure out our lineups, I’ve got to figure out who’s going to play the type of brand and the type of brand and pride and competitiveness that has made this program special. We had an incredible section of fans that showed their support every single game.” (On the 27 turnovers): “Yeah, it’s been brutal all year. I think we might lead the nation in turnovers. Obviously we have to give Texas A&M credit because they did a good job with their pressure. But at this point you can just do whatever pressure you want to and we’re going to give you the ball. You normally want an assist-to-turnover ratio but ours is turnovers-to-assists. That falls on me. We made some more 3s today and that gave us a little life in the second half. It shows how important offense is to your defense, freeing up, just making the game feel better. We’re unsure of the shots to take, we’re unsure if we can make them.”