Boise State Head Coach Leon Rice
“I said it all along. Some of the things that they do, it’s like me with my 10 year old son in the driveway. We can do all of the right things and try to battle, but they are just so physically imposing and I thought they were really, really dialed in, and I knew they would be. I have never ever underestimated Coach (John) Calipari. He’s one of the best out there and they’re getting better. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it on film. They’re coming. They are going to continue to get better. The loss to Baylor sometimes recalibrates, maybe opens up their minds to listen a little bit more. The more they trust him, the better they are going to continue to get.”
“It was funny. I was talking to a coach who played them and he said you need to simulate playing against a 7’1” guy who can move and block shots and I’m not sure I knew how to do that. You just can’t simulate their size in practice. They can make mistakes and then make up for them and that’s what they did a great job of tonight. With (Willie) Cauley-Stein, you get to the rim and he blocks nine of them, and he alters probably 10 more of them. We have been able to get to the rim a little bit in the preseason, but not on him. That’s the difference for them. They were dialed in, they were focused defensively, and when they did make a mistake, they made up for them with their hustle plays.”
“I knew coming in here we would have to play an A-plus game, a perfect game. The great thing about a game like this is it prepares us for the league that we play in, which we have some athletic teams. We have to play the right way against them and we slid away from that a little bit. You know, these guys are competitive guys and they want to do it, but they got away from doing it together and tried to make some plays on their own. It’s something that we can learn from and when you play a team that is this athletic, isolations don’t work and one-on-one doesn’t work. We have to beat them with our ball movement and player movement. We got away from that just enough that we couldn’t score.”
“It’s a pick your poison. If we don’t do that, Julius Randall gets 30. It’s a little bit of trying to make them shoot jump shots, and that’s what a lot of teams are going to try and do. We just weren’t physical enough to get those defensive rebounds, or enough of them to stay in the game when they did miss.”
Boise State Student-Athletes
“Obviously, Kentucky is an unbelievable team. All credit to their bigs. We play smallball with four guards and they took advantage of it. They just went to the boards and dominated us on the boards. We definitely have to work at getting better at that.”
“We have faced that before a couple of times this year. You’ve got Julius Randle and (Willie) Cauley-Stein switching. They can still defend the guards. At times we had advantages and at times it was to our disadvantage.”
“Credit to Kentucky’s bigs. They altered our shots. We had a gameplan, and we definitely drew away from that a little bit and we splinted a little bit, which you can’t afford to do against a great team like Kentucky. So, we will watch the film and learn from that as we get better.”
“Of course they’re tough. You got Julius Randle and (Willie) Cauley-Stein, two of the best athletes in college basketball right now.”
“I mean that’s tough to simulate, you know, but we just went out there and tried to play the best we could. That’s all we could do.”
“We kind of came apart a little bit and that’s something we’ve got to fix as a team. We can’t be sped up like that. They sped us up and we got out of our rhythm.”
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