Geno Auriemma Monday Quotations

What we did on Monday can really scar you for a long, long time. You are going to hear about it every minute of every single day from everybody. You have to have pretty tough skin to survive in this environment, and sometimes you don't come back from stuff like that very quickly.

The goal is not to play Rutgers three times, the goal is to win the Big East championship. It would be disrespectful to West Virginia to think like that. We set out to get ourselves in position to win a championship and put ourselves in the same position we put ourselves in last Monday (a 48-42 loss at Rutgers) and try to make the outcome a little different.

I think today was another reminder for our team that we can be as good as we were on Monday but when we're not all on the same page and not properly focused where we need to be, we can be just like anyone else. I'm hoping that games like this remind us, because once you get into the NCAA Tournament, you play a game like this, you're going to go home.

She played way more than I wanted her to play. I was hoping that we could limit her minutes. Ann will take (today) off and go Monday (against LSU) and then take Tuesday, Wednesday off and we'll see what happens next week. But we needed all those minutes (Saturday).

We've got some good basketball left in us we haven't played yet. There's a lot that still has to come together for us and hopefully it will be Monday night.

Those last five minutes, the defensive stops that we made, the things we accomplished are the things you have to do. I think we made the plays. Offensively we got the ball where we wanted to get it. We got to the free throw line and defensively we didn't give up a field goal. That is a far cry from last Monday (against Rutgers). That is the nature of the game. You get it right and you feel great. You get it wrong you feel lousy.

If you would have asked me how would I want it to go ... it went exactly the way I was hoping it would go. I was happy for the kids today because I?m not usually one to think in these terms, but if you do what we did on Monday anywhere else in the country, it?s not a big deal. But what we did on Monday can really scar you for a really long time if you play in this program because you?re going to hear about it every minute of every day, everywhere you go from everybody. You have to have pretty tough skin to survive in this environment. I was really proud of our guys to come back after the kind of week that we had to do what we did (Sunday).

If you win, what do they give you? Trophies? Plaques? Rings? If you lose, do they take stuff away? ... We could win Monday by 25 and still come in fourth in our league.