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"“(A&M) played great. They’ve got a good team, and they play so hard and they want it so bad and they guard well and they’ve got three really good players. Joseph Jones was the best player in the game tonight until late when some guys stepped up and made some plays for us. They just scrap. We’re so small, and they just got us on the glass. Our first shot defense was superb, but obviously rebounding wasn’t. "People expected us to blow them out, I’m sure, but that wasn’t going to happen. Guys were hung over, still, from Georgia Tech, the weather outside, and what about our fans. Oh my gosh. I lost a bet before the game because I said ten (thousand). People here are just unbelievable. (16,000 announced attendance.) They deserve the assist on the victory tonight, there’s no doubt about that. I’m proud of our guys. We didn’t play well, we shot it miserably. We actually got some good looks in the first half. Whenever JR gets six looks and five of them are good, but he comes away empty, we just kind of had to piece it together. Our three leading scorers (Simien, Langford, and Giddens) had two points (at 45-43), and somehow we win the game, so those young kids stepped up. Christian made two huge free throws after bricking two, and it was great to see him do that. And then the freshman (Galindo) once again ­ he doesn’t rebound it like he should ­ but he likes it when it’s crunch time shootin’ the ball. "Mike (Lee) will be the first to tell you he’s been pressing; he’s been trying too hard. We had to have him tonight, and he gave it to us. JR wasn ’t effective, Keith got the two fouls early, and I probably should have put Keith back in, but since we didn’t have Wayne and we had the lead, I was thinking we’d at least save Keith for the second half. Mike stepped up and played well. Aaron played well. His stat line is excellent. But everybody else just kind of pieced it together. We play so young, and we played our age, but it’s getting to the point in the season when we’ve got to step up and play a lot more mature. "I’m really proud of our guys. Last year we were behind in the last five minutes eight times, and we were 0-8. A lot of them were blowouts, so a lot of them we were too far behind to come back. Last year, if we lost, we usually lost pretty good. This year we’ve been behind late in the game three or four times, and the guys have been able to piece it together. We’ ll get confidence from this. "You can’t take anything away from A&M, because they played great. But coming off Georgia Tech with Kentucky coming up on Sunday, bad weather, guys don’t know how many people are going to show up. This was a sucker game. Not the opponent, but you could catch guys not being focused, thinking about something else. I thought for the most part we just missed shots in the first half, and got impatient and stuff. But it was a good win. We beat them by six last year, we beat them by five this year, and they just match up good with us. We’ll look at it that way."