18 Quotes by Jim Brownlee

Luke looked like his old self today. He was consistently ahead in the count against most hitters and was throwing all of his pitches for strikes.

I don't have the answer. You need to ask the players why they're playing like they are. Illinois was ready to go and we weren't.

Ian pitched his heart out tonight and really deserved for something good to come out of this start. Unfortunately, our bullpen could not shut Evansville down and we lost another game late due to a big inning.

I did not have a good feeling coming into today because of the way they've been swinging the bats. Luke has really struggled, but he got his confidence going early and he gave us a big lift.

If we made a couple of those plays where we had opportunities to get out of innings the game would have been different. Good teams make those plays and we didn't today.

Kris is the type of player that can really make us go and his competition level has grown tremendously in the past week or so. He has been getting clutch hits and making things happen on the bases with steals. I believe that will start to rub off on some of the other players who are not playing as well as they should be.

Our pitching has been solid the past two weekends against Central Michigan and Northern Iowa and a strong outing from Luke would really keep the ball rolling. It seems that some of our early season problems we had on the mound, both with our starters and in the bullpen, have been corrected and our staff is very different from when Iowa saw us last.

Other than the win at Southern Mississippi, I think this is the best that we have played all year. We got some timely hits and managed to get on base, either with good at bats or getting hit by pitches. Then we ran the bases well and produced with runners in scoring positions.

We still have a good shot at getting into the conference tournament and that's the most important thing.