courtesy of Jack Alden

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"I didn't get to see all that I wanted to look at, but you go through the course of a season and you have to face different things. Regardless of what I said about it's another opportunity, I don't think they were really mentally into it early. And you have to give credit to North Dakota for the way they played. From about the 15:00 mark of the second half down to about the 6:00 mark, I really liked the way we played. In the first half, we had the lead because we were bigger. That was basically it. I thought we didn't take away some things they wanted to do. They shot 34 threes. We can't get 'em to turn it over because they're shooting it like that. But the second half, I thought we were more effective. Our running game never got into it because we couldn't get them to turn it over on the defensive end. We got some defensive rebounds and did a good job on the backboards. We didn't allow them too many second opportunities. "It was one of those games, I do think we gained some things from it. Hopefully, it was a great experience for the North Dakota kids. I really liked that Jeff Boschee (from ND) at half had zero points and had taken two shots, but he had four assists and zero turnovers, and wasn't trying to look for it. Then he had two (shots) in the second half and made both of them. But we had two guys in double figures in rebounds and two other guys who get nine. We need to rebound like that, and I hope we'll do a good job of boxing out so we can rebound like that against a more gifted team. "The way they were playing and with our size advantage, we'd be silly to come down and shoot very many threes, because we can throw the basketball inside. The thing that was disappointing to me early in the game was that Eric and Nick and Drew were content to shoot jump shots themselves. We've got to throw it inside, and when we've got that kind of size advantage, we ought to take the ball to the basket more. That was disappointing. And at halftime we had more turnovers. We had 19% loss of the ball at halftime and they only had five percent. We had shot a great percentage and had done a great job on the boards, but it was turnovers on our part that kept the game a 13-point game at the half. "They're a well-coached team. Munlin, the little guard, I think does some good things. He had 15 at the half, and ended up with just 18. We did a little better job on him in the second half. Behrens, we kept saying he can really shoot it. You've got to get up, you've got to get up. He only drove it to the basket one time, and yet we still didn't get up on him. But you like the fact that they only shot 31% and we shot 56%. But again, we're bigger. "I called (Chenowith's) number and made 'em throw it in to him. I'm screaming at Kirk to throw it to Eric. He makes a move. Then the first free throw he choked it a little. I think he did know what it was (point #1000). If he'd have missed the second one, I told him I wasn't going to let him play for the next three games; let him worry about it that long. But I was proud that he stepped up and made the last one. Only 40 guys have done it, and there's been a lot of guys play here. "(Boise State) is a good basketball team, and I told our kids, 'Don't expect that that one's going to be easy, because I don't think it will be.' It'll be interesting to see how we play and how we come out mentally prepared."

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