Dec. 5, 2011

LOGAN, Utah -

Will Brady Jardine Miss The Rest Of The Season?
"We don't know that yet. It's a possibility. The injury is certainly worse than we thought, once it was retested and everything. He's out for an extended period and possibly the season."

Thoughts On The Team:
"Mainly what I am concerned about his trying to get more physical, getting a little more confidence and believing that we can play a little bit. We're pretty fragile right now. We get knocked around a little bit and we don't respond. We get taken out mentally really easily because we are inexperienced. At some point, somebody has just got to get mad and compete, that is the biggest thing we are looking for right now. If we don't get more physical and get a little mad and try and compete, we're just going to keep getting beat."

"Utah Valley always plays us physical. I am sure they look at it right now as their chance to get back at us and all of that. We've got a little bit, maybe more than a little bit, but we've had some bad luck. Brady was certainly a big blow, but we're not going to have him and that is just the way it is, we lost a good player. We are not going to have him at least for the foreseeable future, so how are we going to respond? And then we don't have Morgan Grim the other night on top of it. He tried to play but he couldn't, so how are you going to respond to that? Throw our inexperienced guys into it and it is just the nature of it. When you get your opportunity you've got to respond and when you are not very confident, it makes it harder. You've got to show what you are made of. Inexperience, that is why everybody talks about it so much, it's a tough thing to deal with and that is what we are dealing with right now."

On Jordan Stone Getting More Playing Time:
"Well, he got a chance to play a lot of minutes. He's going to get more chances because one thing about Jordan [Stone] is he is going to play physical. When I talk about our lack of physicality, I am not really speaking about him because he will play physical and he's always going to have his head in the game, but he is a freshman and he makes freshman errors out there. You look sometimes at the lineups we have on the floor, it's a lot of new people. Even though Preston [Medlin], for example, we consider him an experienced player but really this is the first year he has played. He got a little time as a freshman, but not much. When we got to conference he got hardly any, that is why we red-shirted him because we didn't want to waste him and we look to him as an experienced guy. We've got to get Brockieth [Pane] playing like he can play. Obviously, when you don't have a lot of experience you need to have an all-league guard play like an all-league guard and he wants to worse than anything. He has got to let the game come to him a little bit."

On Utah Valley:
"Other than the two guard [Isiah Williams] who lit us up last year, he stretches your defense big time. [Holton] Hunsaker can shoot too but the stats don't show it yet this year, but it's early. They're pounding the boards and they've had their tough times as well. You look at some of their scores and they are pretty impressive. They're going to come in here, like I say, thinking they can win and they should come in here feeling that way. We'll see how we respond."

On If Brady Jardine Could Redshirt This Year?
"Yeah if he is out for the year, that is certainly something we would look at if he decides that is something he wants to do. Number one, we don't know totally where it is at, but at that point he'd have to decide. Brady is a 3.8-3.9 student, he's got a double major, he's got jobs waiting for him. So, that would be something he would have to look at and decide, but we haven't gotten that far yet."

On Danny Berger And What He Brings To The Team:
"He just brings some skill to the offensive end. He can shoot it and pass it and can play either the two or the three, and he's long, he's about 6'7", so he's tall. He can make some passes and get some shots off that sometimes smaller guys can't. At the defensive end, the physicality issue is certainly something that applies to him as well. (The Pacific game) was his first action at the Division I level. We'll use him wherever we think he can help, at the two or the three."

On Utah Valley's Defense:
"Yeah, they do a really good job defensively. They only guard you out to the three-point line, like you say they're really physical, their defense is they don't get out and deny, they're just clogging everything up and knock you off your cuts and makes it hard to run stuff just the way they approach it from the defensive end. That's nothing new, Dick Hunsaker's teams have always been good defensively."

On The Team's Struggles Offensively:
"We're missing a lot of open shots. As far as the assists, it is hard to get an assist on a missed shot. We've got too many turnovers but the assists part of it, yeah that is a big part of it. We don't make the extra pass as much as we should, so it is a little bit of a combination of both."

Do You Try And Simplify Things Right Now?
"Nothing is too simple. Right now the most important thing for us is that we are not physical enough and that is affecting us on the rebounding end, that's affecting us on the defensive end, that's affecting us on the offensive end because we don't screen. We're just not physical enough and part of it is that we don't have a lot of Jordan Stone type bodies out there. We have a lot of slight, thin bodies and they've got to not let that be an excuse and still get more physical."