Ed DeChellis Guys Quotations

I think guys feed off of that. When he's having success, and he's playing well, I think he's even more vocal.

Our guys gave it a great run, but we were a basket or two away from where we needed to be.

Our guys did a great job. I'm not taking any credit.

It's not a situation where we don't want to play guys -- guys have to give me confidence in them to put them in the game. I'm not a guy that can jump in there, wave a wand and say, 'OK, I give you confidence.' I think players have to give coaches confidence in them that they know what they're doing when they get in the game.

Our freshmen will be stronger, tougher, better, our sophomores will become juniors. We'll have some guys who have been through the wars.

It was just a struggle. Our problems on offense transferred to the defensive end and our guys got pretty frustrated.

We're not ready at all. We're just not. I told those guys that defensively we're not ready. Offensively, I think we'll be able to score some points. Defensively, we're not ready for Big Ten basketball yet. In fairness, we haven't mixed things up and we've just played man-to-man defense.

It's hard to get post guys the ball against the zone sometimes. For us, that's all we've been playing. We try to work on it pretty hard. Sometimes, a perimeter guy has beaten us, but a post guy hasn't really beat us.

We were in pretty good shape at that point. But they got in a rhythm and have the experience over us. Three of those guys are fifth-year seniors. We are not that. They've got some experienced guys who stepped up and made some big plays. They just shot over us and made some big baskets.

He's one of those guys that you don't really notice until you watch them. He's 6-foot-5 and as athletic as they come.

It was hard the first two years trying to get guys to believe we could win. Guys left who didn't believe we could win or didn't want to win. We're a very young team. We're loaded with freshmen and sophomores in terms of numbers, but I think we're finally starting to coach and put some things together.

If we get those two guys going, we've just got to get some guard production.

Thursday's going to be first game on the road in the Big Ten. We've got some guys that have played in the league and we've got to get the younger guys ready to go. We've got to get better.

Guys were excited to get back to work. We thought we improved as a program, but no one is satisfied, believe me. Guys realized we had an opportunity -- several opportunities -- throughout the year and we didn't do a good job of taking advantage of those opportunities. We felt like we should have had a couple more wins.

No one thought we could win except the 12 guys we have and three coaches. There was more pressure on their side.

Three of those guys are fifth-year guys. We're not that. Sometimes experience plays a critical part in this thing.

There was no pressure on us; we're just coming down and playing. No one thought we could win, other than the 12 guys we've got and three or four coaches. There were 16 thousand people who thought Illinois would win.

The thing I'm trying to get these guys to realize is that we've had some opportunities that we really let slip by.