John Calipari answered a question about SEC teams losing in early rounds of the NCAA Tournament during his press conference at SEC Media Day today.
Of course, Calipari quickly went to last season’s first round loss to Saint Peter’s. Cal compared Saint Peter’s to his early UMass team.
Check out his comments:
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Excerpt from transcript:
Q. It’s no secret you guys have always been judged by how deep you go in the NCAA Tournament, but as a league, the league has had so much success lately. Does the standard need to be changed there a little bit, not just how many teams but how many advance and how deep, because there were some early exits last year.
JOHN CALIPARI: Who?
Q. Auburn, Alabama —
JOHN CALIPARI: You can say it, Saint Peter’s beat us. It happened.
First of all, I really didn’t think someone would ask me the question about Saint Peter’s. But let me say this: They were like my UMass teams. They were undersized, tough as nails, skilled, had a coach that had a swagger. Shaheen did an unbelievable job. They beat us in overtime.
We had a heck of a year last year. I thought we kind of maxed out. We got injured at the end, lose to them in overtime, and basically, for me as a coach, dealing with it, because my teams usually would advance and hadn’t been — but I had to worry about my own team, for mental health and not going in dark places and meeting, sitting and hugging. I mean, that was ridiculously hard for our guys, because we did have a good year. We had a bad finish.
I would say we’re all judged by how you do in that tournament. I’ll give you an example. We went to Kansas and beat them pretty good. And they won the whole thing. We were like, what’s happened? This is crazy. Attack me, attack my kids and all this. It’s a one-game shot. I wish it was best of three; can we change it? But it’s not best of three; it’s a one-game shot. So yes, we will be judged.
But let me tell you, to get seven, eight teams in, you’re judged for your year, and we need to keep getting six and seven teams and eight teams in this thing, nine teams when we add some other people.
Then we’ve got to figure out how do we do that. How do we not just beat each other up, how do you not put a schedule together where you add Gonzaga and Indiana and there’s Michigan and all the teams that we’re playing, I guess.
The other side of it is, if you play those teams, does it better prepare you to advance in the NCAA Tournament. My teams have always played hard schedules. In a normal situation, it helps. Sometimes you have an injury or two, like we did, and it kind of screws up your plans.
Did that answer your question? No. That’s okay.
