Jan. 9, 2002

Recap?|? Box Score?|? Notes

FINAL SCORE: No. 16 Boston College 88, Villanova 81 (OT)

Villanova head coach, Jay Wright:
"As a coach, you know it is going to get you. I hope we can learn from this. Something has to shock us into taking care of the basketball and being able to execute and take care of the ball. Otherwise, it was a great game. It was a decent effort. I still think we can play harder. We didn't get a big rebound. We had the stop to win the game and didn't get a rebound. We are just not ready to win big games. I think we can get there, we just have to work at it."

"We are a young team. You can just see in B.C's eyes. You could see the way they executed. As a staff we have to prepare our guys better for that. We have to do better than that. We have work to do as a staff and as a team. We won some games and I didn't want to get too excited about it. I can't say I am surprised this happened."

"I think they are a savvy team, a well coached team, and they believe in everything they are doing. They scored in O.T. on shuffle cuts in their flex offense that we prepared against and didn't give up for the whole game, but when the game is on the line they were still running it. They executed it better at than end than we defended it. They didn't get that the whole game, but when the game was on the line, they got it. That is a good team. They are a well-coached, disciplined team. We have to start being able to execute defensively at the end, too. That is our responsibility as a staff."

Villanova forward, Ricky Wright:
...when asked if there was anything satisfying about taking the defending league champion to overtime...
"No. We can beat that team, but today we fell a little short. We don't gain any confidence by coming close to beating any team. If we don't win, we have not succeeded."

Boston College head coach, Al Skinner:
"The thing we really wanted to concentrate on was that we really wanted to make sure that we played good defense. They clearly presented us with a challenge with their big people, their interior play and their rebounding. We knew that was going to be a factor. Our pressure has not consistently been good for us and hasn't really turned people over. We had to pick and choose this evening when we wanted to use it."

"I think in the end what happened was our defense did come up with some plays and key turnovers. We executed our offense as well as we had run it all year. From five minutes remaining and in overtime is probably as well as we have run our offense all year. We got the shots we wanted in the areas we wanted. I was really pleased about that part of the game."

"We didn't panic. There was no panic in this team. Even when we were down, no one panicked. We maintained our composure. We talked about executing and what we wanted to do defensively. It was a real good effort."