Nov. 18, 2008

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UMASS (1-2) 58
#13/12 Memphis (2-0) 80

Post Game Quotes
November 17, 2008

Memphis Head Coach
John Calipari

"The greatest moment of the game was the ovation that Derek Kellogg got from our fans. What a classy moment. On top of that it's 12 a.m. and there are 18,000 people here. That's ridiculous. You people are nuts. Then they come back and they did that ovation for Derek, and it just made my day. I just wanted to cry. This is what it's all about."

"Driving down I thought, if Derek wins, this would be a huge game for him on national television for recruiting. Then I said, `forget that'."

"I'm just happy the game is over. I'm learning about my team. I'm happy that Wesley Witherspoon showed some things tonight that we haven't seen. Tyreke (Evans) made some awful decisions. We were 2-19 from the three. Are we going to be that bad, no, but we are right now. A couple guys are pulling back instead of letting it go. They didn't play (Robert) Dozier which surprises me. Dozier should have 30 points. We're going to have to figure out what to do when they shift the defense which is what Derek did and really play off and make us shoot balls."

"We wore them down, which is what we do to teams. We keep running people at you. I think we did some better things in the second half. And again we wore them down. We just kept throwing people at you. Antonio (Anderson) was really sloppy today and messing around with the ball. There were a lot of things that I didn't like. I'm going to go watch the tape tonight and probably pull my hair out. We move on to Puerto Rico and hopefully we're learning a little bit. We're going to show some tape tomorrow. We're going to have a great practice on Wednesday and get ready for a game on Thursday."

"They have a better idea of what we're truly running because they know it. They have an idea of what bothers them. One of them is give us open shots and pack it in and hope we don't make them. My issue with that is it's a heck of a thing to tell your team that we can't play with these guys so just stay in the lane. I think then we have the advantage right away."

UMASS Head Coach
Derek Kellogg

About Tony Gaffney's Performance?
"I want to mention and recognize how unbelievably Tony Gaffney played tonight with 16 points, 19 rebounds, and five blocks. We just needed one more Tony Gaffney out there; a guy who can do all the little things and play hard all the time."

So what was it like out there?
"It was interesting because it was almost surreal walking out and seeing former players, families, friends and all other sorts of people out there. But once the game got started I kind of even forgot I was in the FedExForum. So it was strange, yet also interesting at the same time. Overall, I thought our guys played great and gave a wonderful effort, especially in the first half. They followed the gameplan. We should have actually been up at many times during the contest. But we just weren't making shots. And we're in a different environment--a place we only got to come in and shoot today. We probably just weren't very acclamated to the surroundings."

On the second half.
"In the second half, we wore down a little bit and didn't execute the gameplan. And I'm not sure if there's a correlation between the defense being in front of our bench in the first half, and then being away from us in the second. We're going to have to do some things in practice to where they're actually running the defense instead of us having to tell them what to do every sequence."