Everything USF coach Jose Fernandez said following the South Carolina game

USF lost to South Carolina women’s basketball, 78-62, on Sunday in Columbia. Bulls coach Jose Fernandez spoke with the media following the game. Here’s everything he had to say.

Opening statement

First off, I know how hard it is for a coach to get people to come play her here. For us, starting a home-and-home, it’s good for our program and the Tampa Bay community and the support that we have in Tampa for women’s basketball and us hosting the Final Four and everything like that. This is my third time here. My two previous times were here for the NCAA Tournament. I think this is a great basketball atmosphere.

I think the game didn’t have, at some points it was kind of choppy, it didn’t have a lot of flow. But I thought going into halftime, I knew the third quarter was going to be big, especially the first five minutes. In that third quarter, the difference went from 12 at half or 11 at half to 22-23 and we missed five free throws that quarter, the ball didn’t go in the basket. I’m sure Coach Staley really challenged her ball club at halftime. I thought that was a difference. Going into the fourth quarter, we wanted to play the final 10 minutes with great energy and effort. We made some shots and the deficit got down to whatever it was, 16.

But I think the biggest thing people ask is, we played a really good schedule up to now and played some very good teams. The difference when you play South Carolina is their depth and there’s not a lot of drop-off when substitution patterns happen. So I think they can definitely go on those runs and score in bunches. In that third quarter, when they pressed out of those free-throw situations, I think we could have done a much better job getting the ball to where we needed to.

Hopefully, this game for us carries over to our next two home games; we have Northwestern State on Tuesday and then we have Duke. And we’ve already played UConn, TCU, Vanderbilt, and Mississippi State. So, our record really isn’t indicative of the type of team we have, but I think, without a doubt, this schedule is going to get us ready for league play.

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Offensive rebounding was a huge strength today, just what were y’all able to do to really overcome their height?

Well, when you miss more shots, there’s more opportunities for offensive rebounds, right? So, that stat line can be a little deceiving, because there’s a lot more opportunities on misses. What did we have? We had 39 misses and we got 17 offensive rebounds, so almost a 45% clip. Only thing is, for as many offensive rebounds we had, we only had 12 second-chance points. So, that means we’re only converting off 6 of those 17, so that stat’s a little misleading.

But I like that we had great energy and we went to the glass. There’s a lot more opportunities when you miss shots. It’s tough to beat a team where, we tried to mix up man and zone, and they still shot 51% from the floor, and we shot 39? It’s a good question, though.

And you mentioned the home-and-home, is it definite that South Carolina will come to Tampa next year?

Yeah, yeah.

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You talked about some of those teams you’ve already played. Have you seen the effects from those games, the learning curve, kind of up itself as you guys get ready for the AAC in a couple weeks?

I think we learned early when we went to UConn, we only had two kids on our team that had played in that type of environment, were in an NCAA Tournament game. The second-quarter media (timeout), we’re down 6, we’re at the free-throw line, there’s two free throws, they go on a 14-4 run, a 14-2 run, and we’re down 18. Just like that. That was like our third or fourth game, I don’t think we’re ready for that.

I was pleased with how we competed against Louisville and Mississippi State, because those came down to possession games. TCU was right after a Mississippi State game, where they played really, really well, and we went through some stuff.

Yeah, sometimes you play this type of schedule, how is it going to affect you? How much toll can it take on you mentally and emotionally? But it’s continuing to tell our kids we’ve got a really, really good basketball team. And the reason why I played this schedule is because I believe that we’ve got a good team.

Now, the only thing is we don’t have any signature wins right now to help us. But hopefully at the end of the year the committee can really look at that, unlike a lot of people around the country, we went out and played people, and didn’t get paid to go play people. We went and played Louisville on a neutral site, we went to the Caymans to play two, and all the other games are home-and-homes. Because you can play a tough schedule, but you’re getting paid to play a tough schedule and get beat 50, right? That’s not our case.

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