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Coach Williams' postgame comments
after Kansas 97, Fairfield 71
courtesy of Jack Alden

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"It wasn't the prettiest thing I've ever looked at, to say the least. I told the kids in the locker room, it's a W, but we've got to get a heck of a lot better. It was very frustrating out there tonight. We can't have 22 turnovers and be the kind of basketball team we want to be. You look at some of the stats, and you force 30 turnovers and you shoot 53 per cent and you out-rebound somebody 53 to 32, it should be maybe a 50- or 60-point margin.

"I was really impressed with the effort of the Fairfield kids and how they competed. Nick Bradford one time dove on the floor and got the loose basketball for us, but most of the time they were the aggressive ones going after loose balls. They tried to penetrate to the basket, and we didn't get people across to stop and support. It was a frustrating night, but we understand it's gonna be like that, or at least I was afraid it was going to be like that. We didn't have much competition in the second exhibition game, and this was the first time we played somebody who is going to compete with them, and I think it shocked our guys a little bit. I think we didn't respect them enough at times.

"We do have some depth, but it's not a positive for you if when they get in there they don't play well. I wanted to give a lot of guys a lot of minutes to get them some game conditions and see if we would respond. I'm a little discouraged right now. You look down, and it says 97-71, but we've got to be smarter than we were tonight. All the little things we spent so much time talking about the first 26 practices didn't show up for us tonight.

"Kenny Gregory was 9 of 15, Eric Chenowith had five blocks, but you can't have 22 turnovers and expect the coach to be happy.

"After the first four minutes, I thought Nick (Bradford) played really well. The first four minutes, he was a little out of control himself, but after that I thought he played very well. In fact, if I had to pick one guy, I'd say he's the guy who did make me feel like he'd been out there before and did make me feel like he'd been at practice.

"In the first half, Drew is right inside the three-point line and he's got Luke wide open in the corner, but he shoots the ball himself instead of passing it to Luke and going to the backboards, which is better for Kansas. Our odds are a heck of a lot better with Luke shooting and Drew rebounding, as opposed to Drew shooting and nobody rebounding. But those are young mistakes and we're going to have those kinds of things, and I've got to be able to live through them myself.

"We didn't get to work on our half-court game as much as we wanted. They played a lot of zone, and I said this week in a press conference we have not worked on zone offense, and I think anybody who watched the game could see that out there. It's something we've got to spend some more time working on. I think we've got really good shooters, and we didn't shoot it very well tonight, particularly from the outside. But we've spent almost zero time on zone offense, and that's the reason it looked so bad. It's not the kids' fault; it's my fault. But they played more zone than they did man, and when they did play man, we didn't do a good job of execution.

"At halftime, Dr. Wertzberger came in and looked at (Jeff Boschee's ankle), and we were going to watch him warm up in the second half. He wanted to try to go, but you could just see that he couldn't make it, that he couldn't make moves off of it. He had one wide open shot but didn't take it because he wasn't comfortable with it, so we made the decision not to play him the rest of the half.

"We've got to understand that it's going to be up and down with (Lester Earl, who didn't suit up). In the pre-season conditioning, in the pick-up games, Lester's knee did not swell. But after you start the pounding of our everyday practice situations, it's a much, much more intense program, and his knee continued to swell. He had it drained on Saturday night, came in Sunday for practice, and it was swollen big again. We've got to figure out a way that we can keep the swelling down.

"We have practice at 9:00am tomorrow morning, and we're going to have a good, solid workout. We'll go for a couple of hours, and we're going to go very, very, very hard. It's gonna make me feel better. I don't know about the guys. Then we'll eat and go over to the football stadium and try to cheer on the seniors in their last game. Then we'll come back Sunday night and go hard again, then we'll practice Monday, and then we'll go up (to the Great Alaska Shootout; first game vs. Georgia), but we've got a lot of work to do."

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