All I wanted to do was make him take tough, contested shots.

It's unusual to play a team like that this early (in the tournament). I think it helps us and gives us more confidence. They had the best (regular season) record in the NCAA this year.

It put us under the microscope. We concentrated on Duke and how Duke can be better.

It's a bad feeling we have to leave here with.

They're a very, very hungry team; they're scrappy. In Johnson and Thornton, they have two very athletic big men who really go after it hard, and they have good shooters around those two guys. And they're a very athletic team.

They got a lot of easy buckets in transition, either getting rebounds or steals. They just got a lot of run-outs, and we didn't get back and we didn't play Duke defense. We didn't play like our normal selves on the defensive end. That made a big difference in this game.

They score in a lot of different ways, and it seems like that never goes away. They can score in large spurts. They had a prime example of that in their last game. We didn't want to relax or let up because we knew they were capable of running off 10, 12 or 14 points in a matter of a few minutes.

Any team we play, you might as well throw their record out of the window because they're not going to play like their record against us. But that's what makes each win for us even more special, because we really have to go out and fight each game.

We have more depth this, we're healthier and I feel like we're not drained physically and emotionally. Last year by the time we got to the Sweet 16, all games through out the year banged us up and we had two very tough games in the early rounds and it just wore on us. I felt like we had nothing left in our tanks by the time we got to the Sweet 16 last year.

You always want to go into March, the most important part of the season, with a lot of momentum, a lot of confidence.