Everything Andy Enfield said after SMU loss to Clemson

SMU head basketball coach Andy Enfield met with reporters after the Mustangs fell to Clemson in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament. Here’s what he said with the media on Thursday.

Q. Coach, I know it didn’t end up the way you wanted, but just the way you guys were able to respond after a little bit of a sloppier start, I know they had one, too, but what was the message to the team after the halfway point of the first half, and how did you feel about their ability to take control of the game?

ANDY ENFIELD: Our players competed at a high level today, played very hard. You said we outscored them in the paint. Significantly, we were very tough. 16 turnovers. We had nine steals. We did enough defensively to win the game today. Very proud of their effort.

Q. I know you haven’t had a whole lot of time to reflect on this season, but your first year, you haven’t even been in Dallas for a whole year yet. What can you take away from what you guys have been able to do, the expectations you’ve exceeded, and how do you feel moving forward with this group?

ANDY ENFIELD: Well, we really like our team. They’ve been just impressive young men, with 10 new players, came together. They’ve had a terrific season with winning on the road, winning on neutral courts and winning 23 games so far. So it’s been a lot of fun to coach these young men. They grew as a team. They grew as individuals. We’re a pretty good basketball team right now.

Q. If the NCAA Tournament may not be in the cards this year, if you do have the opportunity to play in some other postseason tournament, is that something y’all are hoping to do?

ANDY ENFIELD: Well, I’m not really thinking about that right now, honestly. We’re just — we had our chances in the last couple minutes. Even the last play of the game where a guy got hit on the hand in a three-point shot, down two in the corner left, Chuck got hit on the hand on his shot, couldn’t follow through, and the out-of-bounds call where the Clemson guy kicked it. We missed free throws down the stretch. We missed a couple of — missed a lay-up, and then we missed a four-foot floater with no one on us. A lot of things didn’t go our way in the last three minutes of the game, unfortunately.

In a game like this you have to try to convert, so that’s the stuff we’re more thinking about instead of what’s going to happen here in the next few days.

Q. The players were discussing earlier about y’all’s first year in the ACC. What have you learned about your experience here in the ACC?

ANDY ENFIELD: What have we learned? You’re from Virginia Tech, right? You need another hotel because we had to stay in Radford because there was only one hotel on campus, which is a very nice hotel. We just had to stay in — but no, Virginia Tech is a great place to go. They have a lot of great coaches, including Coach young.

But this league is very spread out now with the West Coast additions of Cal and Stanford, SMU in the south. I think it’s an amazing league.

This year probably won’t have the number of NCAA Tournament teams as a normal year. We’ll see. That will be determined here coming up. But it’s an incredible basketball league, and we’re thrilled to be in it at SMU. My coaching staff and our players, they did a great job this year of competing and putting us in position to win seven road games, went 7-3 on the road in the league, and to go 13-7 in the first year.

So that’s a credit to our players, and I have a great coaching staff. So when you go compete against some of these storied programs around the country, in the conference, it was impressive what our guys did. So we’re very, very proud of them.

You always hate to lose a game like this, but if you look at — take a step back and take a deep breath, what our guys did this year has been really, really impressive.