Talkin' Hoops with Gary Blair - Show #15

“First, it was our way of giving back to the fans who have built this program. It hasn’t just been all players and coaches, it’s been the fans who built and have made Reed Arena one of the hardest places to win in men and women’s basketball, so we give credit to them. Buppy’s Catering did a great job of having the free buffet for everyone who came. I hope everyone has heard about Buppy. He was in a serious accident and is at St. Joseph’s hospital right now. He was unloading one of his race cars and it fell on him. He’s doing fair from what I understand, not real good. Buppy has meant so much to athletics at Texas A&M by giving us affordable catering for all the teams can have. But let’s get back to the scene on Monday night. What a great experience. Largest crowd we’ve ever had. To be able to be in the first quad, I wasn’t even ready for it because I saw Baylor go up as number one, so I was stunned to hear our name called in that same region. I got excited about it because now the fan base can go with us to Shreveport and to Dallas. It’s our job to get there. I’m happy for the kids because we’ve been a road team all year. We’re not going to Seattle, Notre Dame, Los Angeles, or Baton Rouge. We get a chance to play McNeese State who are 26-6 this year. They won the Southland Conference this year and are probably the best rebuilding program in the south. If we can win that ballgame, we have a chance to play Rutgers, who we already beat once this year in Madison Square Garden, or Louisiana Tech who is virtually the home team and where I started my coaching career. So I’m pulling for Louisiana Tech, and I’m pulling for A&M, so we’ll see what happens.” 

“I think what will help us is having our fans there because we feed off of our fans. I know just last night we sold 200 tickets for the game in Shreveport. We play early afternoon at four on Sunday, so you can be home by ten or eleven that night and be ready for work or school on Monday. If you can get off work on Tuesday, come on back to Shreveport and watch us play some more. Shreveport is a great town with great seafood, great casinos, and great people.”

“It could do a lot for the sport, and it could do a lot for high school basketball in the Dallas Area. It can do a lot for recruiting because you’re right there in your backyard. Just like if our guys can get back to San Antonio and play in the Regional there. We had this same opportunity four years ago when we went to Los Angeles if we had beaten George Washington in the second round, we would’ve come back home to play North Caroline, and we didn’t get it done. Well folks, that’s happened too many times in the last five years, the only time the seeds have held was when we went to the Elite Eight and almost beat Tennessee, but all the other teams we were the higher seed and we had a letdown. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen this year. I think Baylor makes us a better basketball team because we see everything you can possibly see in that ballgame. We all dream of that rematch, but I don’t’ dream of playing Baylor, I dream about getting to the Final Four. If Baylor is the team that’s in our way, then so be it. I think they’re the best team in the country, which means that we’re pretty close behind them, like about three points. It’s up to us to make that difference happen, to be a smarter basketball team at the end of the game situation, to be able to make some turnovers happen at the end of the game not just in the beginning, to be able to score at the end of the game, and to be able to make stops at the end of the game. When all those things happen, we’ll be dancing somewhere.”

“We played great. Playing Texas, we thought they might finally have our number. We have beaten them for 10 straight times and we have played them six times in the last 13 ½ months. The wheel was spinning, and all of a sudden we were rolling, and it’s still our way. We played very, very good against Texas and were able to win by 27 points. Technically 28 if they had counted our three-pointer as a three and not two points. We just match up well with them. We’ve been doing that now for a long time, even though Texas played us a lot better this year than they have the past three years. We had to get ready for Oklahoma next, and that was just a war. Both teams wanted their chance at Baylor. Oklahoma almost beat them up in Norman, and we almost beat them in Waco. We both played hard, neither one of us playing as well as we did in our first tournament game, but we won. Sydney Carter went for 19 points in the second half, my little 5-6 dynamo of energy just carried us and did a great job. We had balanced scoring, we had four kids in double figures and another girl at nine points. Then we moved onto Baylor. We had a decent crowd, with a lot of our fans staying over from the men’s tournament to come support us. We were up 12-0, playing great, stripping the ball from them, hitting layups, hitting tough shots, and balanced scoring. In that 12-0 run, Danielle Adams didn’t even take a shot. That’s what this team is all about, we’re not about one player. Danielle would give up having a chance to make one of the top ten players in the country to be in the Final Four. Danielle would do that in a heartbeat because she’s a team player. I say, let’s do both. We have a lot of basketball in front of us, we’re going to work out hard this week and leave Friday to go to Shreveport and we’ll just see where the chips fall.” 

“When your name is called, even though for nine straight years with my last three at Arkansas and the last six here we knew our name was going to get called. The emotion that comes out, to see the excitement on your kids, to see the freshman light up for the first time who might not have had the chance to go to the Final Four in their high school tournaments. It is such an emotional relief, and you want to share it with your fans. I think that’s the most exciting thing that we have. Also, the next morning, picking up USA Today and going through the capsules of all 64 teams. All of that means something, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, 31 years, and every year is more exciting than the last. But to see the emotions of the kids faces or to have the chest bump from Sydney Colson when she got up to speak to the crowd, that’s my favorite thing.”