Dec. 30, 2005
No. 20 Oklahoma vs. No. 16 New Mexico
Dec. 30, 2005
Albuquerque, N.M. – The Pit/Bob King Court
POSTGAME QUOTES
New Mexico Head Coach Don Flanagan
“They (Oklahoma) a better effort than we did and were muchmore physical and aggressive in the first half. They rantheir offense and executed it much better than we did,especially in the first half. I think they were mentallyprepared to play that game. They believed they were goingto be successful. For some reason we didn’t believe wewere going to be successful. I was really disappointedwith our effort at halftime. We’ve done that before ingames where we gave a good effort for the one half.Sometimes it’s the first half, sometimes it’s the secondhalf. We have to get over being a one half team. We haveto be able to play the full game. I though the second halfwe played harder. We executed a little better, we defendeda little bit better. They defended us better, they playedharder, they played more confident. They executed theiroffense and their defense better, consequently they won.”
“We have a game on Sunday against New Mexico State and wehave to bounce back. The good thing about being abasketball team is that you play a lot of games. This wasa tough game for us. I just saw so many things out therethat I didn’t like. It was probably a good thing for me tosee that we weren’t executing from bench to floor. They(UNM players) weren’t carrying out some things and thenthe mental part of it I was really disturbed with. Ithought we would be mentally prepared.”
Oklahoma Head Coach Sherri Coale
(on Oklahoma’s energy in the first half): “That’s what wespent three days working on and talking about. Good thingshappen when you play that hard – you make your own luck.We were intent on determining our own destiny tonight.There were times in the first half when I couldn’t haveeven told you what the score was. I had no idea, I hadn’teven looked at the scoreboard and I think they (OUplayers) felt that way too.”
(on Chelsi Welch): “Chelsi was terrific. She was smart ondefense, she was strong on offense and she reboundedextraordinarily well. Courtney (Paris) has been carryingus in scoring and at halftime we had 44 points and she hadonly played five minutes. I don’t know if our team neededa better message than that.”