Memphis vs. Houston Post Game Quotes

Feb 13, 2008 | Men's Basketball

Feb. 13, 2008

Game 24

Houston(18-5, 7-2, C-USA) 59
(1/1) Memphis (24-0, 10-0, C-USA) 68

Memphis Head Coach John Calipari

This was exactly the type of game that we needed to play. Everybody said to me, did you go crazy at halftime? I really didn't raise my voice. If I have to raise my voice at this time of the year at halftime, then we're petering out. I went in and I just said, this is what we needed. You're talking about a team that is playing for their lives; they out scraped us, out rebounded us and made a few shots. Some of them were like, oh my gosh. So now, I said we're at halftime of the NCAA tournament, let's see how we perform. We went over a couple of things defensively. I heard them say it, the first five minutes you know how we play, the first five minutes.

The energy was great. I though Shawn Taggart was great. He fumbled that first ball and I wanted to see what he would do. Okay, he blocked a shot, he got a rebound, he ran the court, he defended and then we went with Joey. I think again the difference maker in my opinion, is little Andre Allen. I thought Andre just changed the whole game. What he did, he did it by running our team. He just ran our team. It wasn't that he did this, did that. He ran the team and then he also defended. I thought he did a good job defensively. Doneal Mack defended.

Houston Head Coach Tom Penders

"I thought this was a tournament type game. There was a lot of electricity in the air. It is a really competitive ball game. I think the better team won tonight. Memphis finds a lot of ways to win, but I'm proud of our kids for how hard they played and how they scrapped and we hung in there."

"Threes are part of our attack. We shoot threes fairly consistently. We shoot 34-35 percent from three, and that's like shooting 50 percent from inside. I thought we also attacked the rim. We went inside and drove but we couldn't get a lot of shots. They blocked a lot of them and we couldn't get four of five them to go down or get to foul line out of it. We needed to have that going for us. We need to have penetration. We shot 37 percent from three for the game we shot 42 percent from the floor. We didn't do well the closer we got in so maybe we should have taken more threes."