courtesy of Jack Alden

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"Congratulations to Kelvin and his staff and the players at Oklahoma. It was a hard-fought game to say the least. It was two teams that really battled extremely hard. At the end of the game there's only one team that can be the winner. Unfortunately for us it wasn't us tonight. "We put ourselves in such a hole because of how poorly we played offensively in the first half. I told the team at halftime that we would be there, that we would get back in the game if we were just a little bit more patient and get the shots we wanted instead of taking the ones they wanted us to take. We got to 41-41, and that's one of the few times I ever looked up at the clock. Then we gave up two free throws, missed a shot, go down to the other end and give up three offensive rebounds and they finally score to go up four. Then we come down and Nick makes one inside to cut it to two. Then we had two huge defensive breakdowns. One where we didn't get back on the break and another where Kirk made a sensational play sprinting back but everybody on our team didn't get back and we give up another two points. Just a lack of hustle, and we can't do that. If you're gonna play somebody like Oklahoma at this stage of the season, you've got to hustle every frickin' play, and we didn't do that today. "After that, the rest of the story of the game as far as I was concerned was Hollis Price just made some big-time jump shots. He felt like he could shoot it over Boschee. He made at least two threes late in the game that I thought were just huge threes with Jeff right in front of him. So you've got to congratulate Hollis, who appears to be a great younster and made some big-time baskets for them. We just couldn't get over the hump, didn't execute the way we have to execute at crunch time. I can't fault our guys for trying, because they wanted it badly and tried very hard. But it's not just that. You have to execute and do the things that you practice and do the things you're supposed to do when times get tough."

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