Steve Alford Games Quotations

We're going to enjoy this for 48 hours. I'm glad we don't play till Friday because playing three games of this caliber in three straight days, it gives us an extra day to get some rest.

We know we're down to five games (in the regular season). We have to do our part ? we have to play well.

We've been in first place for almost six weeks. That's a heck of a stretch. We're 20-8 and 9-5 in the best conference in the country and we have two big home games left.

We're 7-2 in the nine games since that came up. That tells everybody where our focus has been.

Since we got back from Michigan State, we didn't just talk about Indiana. We started talking about this week. We've grouped these two games together.

Maybe your anxiety and nerves are different. Every year it seems we're on the brink and not knowing how many games we had to win or in '01 knowing we needed to win all of them to get in. It's a different feeling this year. There's the pressure that we think we're a pretty good basketball team and winning one of the two Big Ten championships is out there.

For whatever reason, on the road our defense has not been nearly as good as it's been at home. We're going to have to get back to that because we're really going to have to guard these last two games to give ourselves a chance.

We were very fortunate to grind out a win. We got it the way we won a lot of games this year, with our defense.

We shot extremely well. You have to make shots. It's hard to win four games in four days when you have one or two bad shooting nights. And you have to prepare to play four games, not just one.

That's Jeff. That's his mentality and his mindset. He was mad at me for the four games he sat out. He's not going to change.

They played three games in three days. That's not easy. They don't have a real deep bench right now. We just wanted to wear on them.

It's two very pivotal home games for us. But if we're fortunate enough to get them, it's been one heck of a regular season and we try to get some momentum going into the Big Ten tournament.

It's very difficult to win road games, but it's hard to win homes games (too). If, all of a sudden, you don't play well -- a game where you don't make shots or where you're not on top of your game defensively -- you really run the risk of losing regardless of where the game is being played ... This league is very demanding, very difficult.

That's a heck of a stretch. Now we've got two very big home games coming up, and we have to win those games and hope something else happens.