Feb. 22, 2007

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Memphis Head Coach John Calipari
"Doneal Mack wasn't there for us, and I thought it might hurt us, but we shot the ball well. They were open threes, though. I think there are going to be games where people are going to have to make a choice. Let's hope they're not making them. I didn't think there were many contested threes. I think they were planning on us to drive. They were playing us back in. They were playing us back in the paint."

"I love what Willie (Kemp) did. I was all over Willie because he was trying to make hard plays again. The second half was easy. If he was open, he shot it. If he wasn't, he passed it. How he played was as well as he's played for us."

"I thought Antonio Anderson was outstanding and so was Chris Douglas-Roberts. Early on Chris was a little bit shaky, but I thought he got better as the game went on. We're a good team."

Rice Head Coach Willis Wilson
"A couple of times we just missed out on a couple of (defensive) assignments. When we went to the zone, we felt like there were a couple of guys we needed to get to, and we just didn't get to them. They knocked some shots down and took the wind out of our sails. We tried to make a run, and the truth of the matter is their pressure got to us a couple of times. We just put ourselves in situations that are hard to defend by turning the ball over out on the wing and the perimeter. It's hard to defend two-on-one, three-on-two and three-on-one situations."

"I think you have to (control the tempo) against this team, and it's not an easy thing to do. It's much more difficult to do than to say. I just thought that we didn't have the strength to sustain it when we needed to. It was just some defensive assignments that we blew that you can't blow against a good team."

"On the baskets that (Kareem) Cooper got inside, one we didn't do a good job of discouraging him from going inside and two we let him go to his 'go-to' move. You can't let a guy that big take his time and go to his 'go-to' move."