11 Quotes by Tommy Dempsey

Obviously, it starts with Jared. That's where our scouting report started. But he got 16 and 10. That's just how good he is.

He was terrific. We had no answer for him. He broke us down off the dribble. He beat us to rebounds, loose balls. He was very good today.

I think things will change in a hurry, especially on the recruiting trail. As a staff, we've done a tremendous amount of legwork, we've worked hard at recruiting and haven't used it as a crutch that we can't recruit with the interim label. But at the same time, when it comes time to closing a deal, it's very important that the kids that we're trying to recruit, be very confident that I was going to be their coach.

We're not going to hide behind the fact that we had a disappointing season in this year of transition. But it didn't break us apart and in my opinion it has really helped us come closer together. I think we're very hungry and we're ready to show everybody that we can become a great college basketball team.

We came in here to win tonight. I'm disappointed. I thought this was a game we could win.

We've had patience with the freshmen and look at it from a game-to-game standpoint. We're trying not to measure things just on wins and losses. We're trying to gauge improvement. We're building anew and it takes time. Rodney has really helped us at the point.

As a freshman, Rodney has shown great leadership qualities. He's really done a great job of getting the ball where it needs to go.

This is what I consider to be the opportunity of a lifetime. I can't promise you what our record will be next year. I can't promise you how many NCAA tournaments we're going to play in. But I can promise you that I'll run a program that everybody associated with this great school is going to be proud of.

They did a nice job on Thompson. They really crowded him and banged him and were physical with him.