Louisville-Boston College Postgame Quotes
February 06, 2016 | Men's Basketball
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Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino
(Opening Statement)
“You probably know … BC, before the game, sent their starters out to halfcourt to address our players and applaud them for the type of season they had and the type of people they are. I thought that was an incredible gesture. It doesn't surprise me coming from Boston College, but we so appreciate it. I thought it was a very professional performance tonight to get a win. I think after a certain period of time we were emotionally drained. I know I was tearing up in the national anthem, so it was very emotionally draining for all of us, but we got through it. We got a win, and now we move on. It's probably very good that we don't have a lot of time between games so that we can continue to play basketball.”
(On who was behind the honorary tip for Damion Lee)
“It was me, but to be honest with you I thought of it in five seconds. Kenny (Klein) kept trying to come up with ideas to do to honor him. The first 23 I didn't like, so I just came up with it on the spot.”
(On how Trey Lewis played given the circumstance)
“He was the one I was most worried about with the emotion. I thought he did a very good job. He got to the line. He was 9-for-9 from the foul line. I think for the first seven-eight minutes the guys just played incredible defense.”
(On how he felt the atmosphere was)
“It's the only thing we have is the fans right now. It's the only thing we can hang our hat on for these guys. And the fans, I knew they would do it. They've been great fans from the first day that I walked into this place.
(On whether the goal is to win the ACC regular season)
“It is. I don't know if they would acknowledge it. At Kentucky we did it my second year and they didn't acknowledge it. So, hopefully they would – we'll give it our best shot. It's not going to be easy, playing at Duke, at Virginia, at Notre Dame and at Pittsburgh, but we'll give it our best shot.”
(On whether he would encourage the petitions to overturn the postseason ban)
“Let me say this, the system is broken. Please nobody blame Dr. Ramsey, Tom Jurich made this decision, not Dr. Ramsey. Dr. Ramsey had to okay it, if Dr. Ramsey didn't want to okay it, he could have vetoed it. But Tom made the decision. Tom is the best athletic director in all of athletics. Now, the mistake was not made with Tom making the decision, we've all got to live by that because we all love the man, we respect the man. The mistake was made by not having Tom Jurich on the committee. You don't go into war without your general. And they made a mistake in not having him on this committee. Rather than pinpoint who is to blame, we don't want to do that, it is a mistake. Now some committees don't have the AD but in this case you needed the AD. So, if Tom Jurich would have known of what the meeting's going on, this would have happened a month and a half ago, because he said if we have a problem, if we have violated rules, we will own up to it and we will address it immediately. He said that. And he addressed it the first time he knew it. It's not worse than you think and it's not going to be.. he would have addressed it right away, six weeks ago. Everybody says, 'oh it must be much worse...' No. It was the first time he knew of the violations and he addressed it immediately. It doesn't matter whether I agree or disagree with it. My feeling is with the NCAA, I think it is wrong to penalize these kids in this regard. I think when, back in the old days when players gambled and they took them down and there was a scandal and they took them out and they made them ineligible for life. They deserved to be, they gambled. But in this case, when you're not directly involved, it's my belief that it should be automatic that you are fined $10 million dollars and that the coaches get fined 50 percent of their salaries even if they know about it. Doesn't matter, they should be fined 50 percent of their salaries, because they were leading. That's what happens on Wall Street. If JP Morgan does something wrong, Jamie Dimon didn't know anything about it, but that person is going to pay an $800 million dollar fine and that's what I believe should happen if the players… now, if our players were involved in this, they should be out of the tournament and should not be allowed to play. That's my opinion, but that is not the way it works. All this investigating, it should be immediately. You should kill the university pocketbook right away and take that money and put it in a scholarship for needy kids to go to college and athletes and so on. This is wrong. It's a bad system, but that doesn't mean we are not wrong in what we've done. The limited knowledge, that I know, we were wrong - it should have never gone on. It turns my stomach. And I've said it 100 times, I don't want to keep beating this, but I don't know why they did it, it doesn't make any sense to me. It makes no sense. And everybody who was involved hurt a lot of good people - lot of fans and that should have never gone on. It did. And innocent people now will pay the price, so to answer you, we are going to support Tom and his decision and we are going to support Dr. Ramsey for okaying his decision. I never go against Tom because if he came to me and tried to say 'Coach what do you think, maybe you should come out of the match-up zone,' I would tell him where to go, but in this regard, he is the general – he's the brightest guy in the room. So we all respect… And as tough as it is, I mean I am sick over it. I can't tell you how sick I am. My resistance is so low right now I have Ralph Willard who has a minor cold not sit next to me and I am emotionally very distraught over this. But I believe in the man, I believe he knows what's right I believe he knows much more than all of us combined in terms of what the right thing is to do. It's the NCAA system that is wrong. It's wrong. We should be penalized - no question about it - but not this team shouldn't be penalized - but the NCAA didn't make that decision, we made that decision. So we've got to stick with it and just move forward in a positive way, but we've got a great leader and we've got to follow that leader.”
(On whether Jurich shared specifics of the violations with Pitino)
“I'm not allowed to know anything and the reason being, that I just don't understand any of this. I still have to be interviewed. I come out and say 'I didn't know anything.' I said this yesterday, 'there's not one coach in America, not one junior college coach not one, that would ever tolerate this behavior. Forget me, not anybody, nobody would tolerate. Nobody, no coach in this country would tolerate that behavior. There must be a price to pay for that behavior, certainly, but this team shouldn't pay that price unfortunately. And I believe the NCAA needs to change, it's not going to change with us. That unbelievable speech that Jimmy Valvano made that night was, 'it's not going to save my life, but I hope it's going to saves others' lives.' Well, in this case it's not going to save the University of Louisville, but something should change when the people are not involved; they should not pay the penalty and I believe that we should get hit with a heavy, heavy financial fine that puts us where we've got to go out and fundraise to make up for it and do anything possible. I believe that's what should be done. We should be hit with a $10-15 million dollar fine and that's it - unless somebody was involved. And I think that's what the NCAA should do down the road. It's not going to do anything now but they should start thinking about that. Where you really hurt a university is their wallet. Where you really hurt a coach is his wallet.”
(On if fans deserve an explanation on ban)
“We violated rules. We violated rules. I mean the lady wrote a whole book. What was her motive. Her motive was to hurt us and make money. It wasn't to clean up the system, come on. So, we got hurt - mission accomplished for her, the publisher and the writer, we got hurt. They weren't trying to clean up the ills of college basketball, believe me.”
(On Damion Lee's health for the Duke game)
“I don't know. We are going to make sure he's 100 percent.”
(Closing Statement)
“I'll end this speech by saying this. Sometimes I get on a soapbox and I say how much integrity this program has. And it really is true. It really is true. It's tough to fathom what went on. Because you know how people say, 'He had to know. He had to know.' I get very upset at that, but I did the same thing to everybody around me. I started getting paranoid. 'You had to know. How could you not know?' 'I didn't know, I was over at that dorm 100 times. I did not know.' 'You had to know, security.' It is, unfortunately, that type of situation. I became paranoid when it happened. So, I don't get upset when I hear people say, 'He had to know,' because I did the same thing myself with the people surrounding me. Grabbing managers and saying, 'You had to see something. Why didn't you come to me?' I had a kid, Logan Baumann, who is the most honorable man in the world, 'You had to know something.' I grabbed my nephews and said, 'You had to know something, you lived there.' 'Uncle Rick, I didn't know a single thing, I never saw a single thing.' I'll leave you with that thought. It's unexplainable, undeniable, sometimes. My faith is in Tom Jurich. He is a great AD. Did he hurt us? More than you could ever imagine. Are our fans suffering along with our players? More than anything. But we've to trust our leader. He leads us into good times, he leads us into bad times. We've got to trust our leader. Dr. Ramsey is taking a lot of heat right now. Please don't give him the heat. He's taken enough heat from enough places. He doesn't need this heat. Because he's done a lot of great things for our university. A lot of tremendous things for our university. Just getting off that highway, driving down that street and seeing the way that campus looks right now, and all the things he's done for our university… Please. He doesn't deserve this. Thank you.”
Boston College Head Coach Jim Christian
(Opening statement)
“Obviously, a very emotional night for them. My heart goes out to those two fifth-year seniors for their team. I'm not here every day obviously, but just watching them play on the court, the way they interact with their teammates, the way they play… total team players. So my heart went out to those two fifth-year guys. I know what it's like. I've coached fifth-year seniors. It's a tough, difficult thing for them. In terms of the game, I thought we fought back hard in the second half to cut it to nine. Our problems have been the same night in and night out. We don't have enough guys playing consistently yet and when we go to the bench, it's hard for us to hold things down. We don't have a lot of offensive weapons coming off the bench and teams go on runs. So our defense can only hold for so long.”
(On what keyed the early second-half run)
“I think we started attacking the press and advancing the ball up the floor and making plays. We started penetrating with the ball. That's what you have to do against them. You can't keep pulling the ball back out and that's what we were doing in the first half. You got to attack them when you get opportunities and then you got to finish plays. When you get good opportunities you got to make them. I give them credit. They're obviously an excellent defensive team.”
(On the team acknowledging Trey Lewis and Damion Lee during pregame introductions)
“My thinking is, I think we forget sometimes that these are young people. And young people who lose opportunities that are very, very important to them. And players, I think our kids just wanted to acknowledge that they respect them as players and everybody says it could be them. It's a difficult situation. I thought just watching interviews with those guys; I thought they handled themselves in a first-class manner. I would expect nothing less from anybody in this program. And they did, so I think our guys just wanted to acknowledge that. It was the right thing to do.”
(On the performance of Sammy Barnes-Thompkins)
“He's played well. I mean, he's had an opportunity and Sammy plays with confidence. He's helped us the last two nights by playing with confidence.”
(On what caused the slow start in the first half)
“I think we kept pulling the ball back out. We weren't attacking the pressure at all. We were stopping it at half court and trying to run set plays. Now they're back in their matchup and changing defenses. But, you have to attack them. They force you to make basketball plays and we didn't do it. Every timeout we were urging them to do it and for some reason they were very passive.”
