Arkansas Razorbacks' coach Mike Neighbors' complete press conference after a 40-point win over the Georgia Bulldogs on Sunday afternoon at Bud Walton Arena in Fayetteville, Ark.
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00:00 Mike, can you elaborate on Talia Scott's injury?
00:02 Anything there?
00:03 - We'll know more tomorrow.
00:05 It kind of happened in a weird time
00:07 when we couldn't get her in to see the doctor.
00:08 It's very precautionary.
00:10 And we'll know a lot more tomorrow.
00:13 But we knew, we had two days of practice without her.
00:17 We kept it, believe it or not,
00:19 in these days and times, you'd be able to keep a secret.
00:22 But she didn't practice either of the two days,
00:24 which you don't ever want to lose a player period,
00:27 much less somebody that's played like she has.
00:29 But it allowed us two days of practice.
00:32 It wasn't like we found out at tip-off,
00:34 which can be tough.
00:35 So I thought what it did is it allowed
00:37 our kids to rally around Keats.
00:39 Keats had two unbelievable days of practice
00:41 and it carried over.
00:43 She shot like 80% in practice from the three.
00:46 So the fact that she went two for 10,
00:47 it could have been a different deal.
00:49 But built her confidence up.
00:51 And Talia was amazing on the side.
00:53 She was over there cheering right along with everybody else.
00:57 And I think it galvanized our group,
00:59 knowing that we were going to have to do it together.
01:01 It wasn't going to be, and fortunately against Georgia,
01:05 you have to do it as a team.
01:06 It's not a, not one person can break down that zone defense.
01:09 It requires you to make two consecutive actions.
01:12 And that group practiced really well.
01:15 We'll get some news tomorrow, I hope.
01:17 We'll be off tomorrow and then we'll know what's going to,
01:20 we have a home game against Mississippi State, don't we?
01:23 Did they win?
01:23 They were playing South Carolina pretty close.
01:25 They didn't win.
01:26 Okay.
01:28 - Mike, I don't know that you could play any better
01:31 than you did in the first half.
01:33 I mean, you know.
01:34 - I don't disagree with you.
01:35 - Yeah, pretty much flawless.
01:35 But you knew Georgia was going to come out
01:37 in the third quarter and they weren't going to just quit.
01:39 They were going to come at you.
01:40 How about the resiliency of your girls to come out
01:42 and take what Georgia had to give?
01:44 And not only that, but build on it.
01:46 - Yeah, I think our resiliency started from, you know,
01:49 the first half at Kentucky the other night.
01:50 We had a good second half up there.
01:52 We just had dug ourselves too big of a hole.
01:54 So I think we started to show signs of it then.
01:57 And yeah, we couldn't have played much better.
01:58 I think we had one turnover at half and it was really late.
02:01 We bottled up.
02:02 I still say Javin Nicholson's one of the most
02:05 dominating low post scorers in our league.
02:07 There's other ones.
02:08 I'm not, no bulletin board material
02:09 for anybody else out there, but she's in the conversation.
02:12 Our defense led to our offense.
02:14 We really, really took care of it and shared it.
02:18 And then we made a few and that built our confidence.
02:21 I thought our defense led to confidence on offense.
02:24 And at halftime, we went to the locker room
02:25 and we really didn't say anything.
02:27 It was really literally one of those days as coach,
02:28 you walk in and you're like, don't mess this up.
02:30 So you don't say anything other than
02:32 they're going to increase the intensity.
02:35 Don't let that turn to pressure.
02:36 You know, there's a difference in my opinion
02:38 between them pressuring us
02:39 and just in turning up the intensity.
02:41 And they did.
02:42 We knew they would come at us,
02:43 but I thought we weathered it.
02:45 And not only weathered it,
02:46 but I thought we took the punch and then punched back.
02:48 - Mikayla came out and hit the first three-pointer
02:50 of the game.
02:51 How contagious is that when you come out
02:53 and hit a big shot like that to start the game?
02:55 - I don't think you can put a measure on it.
02:57 It is absolutely contagious.
02:59 And with our particular group,
03:02 those three kids shoot so much together.
03:05 Well, four, there's four or five of them that come in
03:07 and they all shoot together.
03:08 And it's one of those, like,
03:09 when you're sitting over there observing,
03:11 if somebody's off, they kind of all tend to be off.
03:13 But if somebody's on, they all tend to, you know,
03:15 kind of raise each other up.
03:17 But they feed each other's confidence.
03:20 Like, they're yelling, "Shoot it," sometimes
03:22 as they're passing it to them.
03:24 Like, "Shot!"
03:25 You know, as the pass is going.
03:26 And I think it's, especially with it being Mac, our leader,
03:31 our kid that hates losing worse than anybody.
03:35 You know, it started on the plane
03:38 in a locker room at Kentucky,
03:39 and then it carried over to today.
03:41 This is a good Georgia team.
03:42 We just, we played, like you said,
03:44 as probably as good as we could possibly play
03:46 at this juncture, coming with all the circumstances.
03:49 - Hey, Coach, you mentioned the Kentucky game.
03:51 Obviously, you guys started slow, stormed back,
03:54 but there was some momentum there.
03:55 How important was it to bounce back today and to play,
03:59 I mean, almost as flawlessly as you guys did?
04:00 - Well, knowing what we know now, it was very important.
04:03 You know, I couldn't have predicted that necessarily.
04:05 I felt better at the end of the game at Kentucky
04:08 than I did at halftime.
04:10 There's no question.
04:11 And I think it exposed a few things for us.
04:14 The toughness that this league requires,
04:16 it got that back into us.
04:19 So I think it did start up there.
04:23 I don't think we played,
04:24 I don't think we play as well as we did today
04:26 if we hadn't have fought back up there at Kentucky
04:28 and had a little bit of confidence
04:31 coming into those two days of practice.
04:33 - And offensively, obviously, you guys were clicking,
04:35 but defensively, also really impressive.
04:38 26%, forcing 20 turnovers.
04:41 Just how happy were you with the performance
04:42 on that end as well?
04:43 Being down Taliyah, who, like you've said in the past,
04:46 is a really good defender.
04:47 - Just elated and proud that there was no questioning.
04:52 You know, a lot of times when you lose a game,
04:53 everybody in the sky is falling,
04:54 and everybody wants to change everything,
04:56 and you gotta do this, you gotta...
04:57 There was none of that.
04:58 It was pointing out the few things
05:00 that we could have done differently,
05:01 and we didn't make those mistakes.
05:02 But our defense has been stellar.
05:04 You know, I think, again, I said it on radio,
05:08 but I want to say it again to y'all.
05:10 The job that our defensive coaching staff does,
05:12 I say something every game about them,
05:14 and they continue to do that.
05:15 But then, also, like Lauren and Maren,
05:17 who are red-shirting, they take on the other team.
05:21 Because we're out of school,
05:22 so our men's practice team is gone.
05:24 So between Bee and Carly, Johnson and Maren and Lauren,
05:29 and then either Christina or Miriam or Jenna,
05:32 not Miriam, Maren,
05:34 those guys have to simulate the other team.
05:37 And it's really hard to do in two days,
05:38 but they take the coaching from our staff,
05:41 and then they take it out on the floor.
05:43 And I thought they had us so well-prepared.
05:45 Those two days of practice, we knew, like I said,
05:49 we knew Talia was going to be out,
05:50 so we didn't practice very long,
05:52 but we practiced with a lot of focus and intensity.
05:55 And I've already got two players back there going,
05:57 "Hey, coach, I think we need to start practicing
05:58 like that more often."
06:00 So it's going to be hard to argue with them at this point.
06:03 - You mentioned Carly a little bit earlier.
06:05 It's one thing to come in and, you know,
06:07 give you good minutes off the bench,
06:08 but to play all 40 minutes in an SEC game
06:11 is really impressive.
06:12 What did she show you tonight?
06:14 - You know, there is nothing that faces that kid.
06:18 Good, bad, indifferent.
06:19 She's just steady.
06:21 So you hoped, you didn't know,
06:24 you don't ever know how anybody's going to react to that.
06:26 You hoped.
06:27 But again, I don't know if I told you all this story,
06:31 but like, she came in and asked me during the off season,
06:34 could she go and represent her tribe in stickball?
06:37 Okay, I said, "Hell, yeah, I go.
06:40 I love stickball.
06:40 I just play out in the yard and, you know, throw it."
06:43 But, you know, do y'all know what stickball is?
06:46 It's the most competitive,
06:47 it's the most physical sport I've ever seen,
06:50 throwing a ball and hitting a pole.
06:51 And like, when I saw what I agreed to let her do,
06:55 I was like, "Well, what have I done?"
06:56 But that's just her.
06:58 You know, that's her.
06:59 We saw it.
07:01 Coach P saw it when we went on an early recruiting trip.
07:03 She played for Coach Biller back at Jones,
07:06 and she's always been that way.
07:08 So you hoped that she would be able to handle it,
07:11 but for her to do what she did --
07:12 and I'm going to tell you again,
07:13 it was mainly what she did defensively.
07:15 She was in the right spot so many times.
07:18 I haven't really talked to her yet after the game,
07:21 but I'm anxious to see how she prepped and got ready for it
07:24 because that's a playbook on how to step up
07:26 when your number's called.
07:29 For me, the players mentioned, you know,
07:31 just flushing the Kentucky game
07:32 and just moving on to the next game.
07:34 As a coach, what's the balance between after a win
07:37 like this, you want to emphasize the good things,
07:40 but you also want to get ready because the next game's
07:42 always around the corner in the SEC?
07:44 We brought the staff in, and I ran through about six options
07:48 of things that you can do after games like that,
07:51 things we've done in the past.
07:52 You know, you can watch the film, you can plush it,
07:54 you can do a variety of in-betweens,
07:56 and you can do all this.
07:57 And as we went around the room and kind of talked about it,
07:59 it became very clear that because the things
08:04 that we did wrong up there
08:06 have no bearing on this game, none.
08:08 Like, the things that we did wrong up there,
08:10 we weren't even going to have to do today.
08:12 So I was like, "Why are we going to dwell on that?
08:14 Why don't we fix that later?
08:16 Why don't we save those four or five methods
08:19 we talked about, and let's just focus
08:21 on getting ready for Georgia?"
08:23 So I honestly think it's one of those deals,
08:25 like, as a kid or now as a parent,
08:28 like, kind of doing the opposite of what they kind of expect.
08:31 Like, I think they were dreading, like,
08:33 "Man, this is going to be, like, oh, man.
08:35 I know what I did," you know, all that.
08:37 And you kind of get that sense of relief
08:39 that that's not what it was.
08:41 I think it helped.
08:42 I think we made the right decision with that part.
08:44 It's easy to say that now looking back.
08:47 But we did. We wrestled with it.
08:49 That's a great question because we do wrestle with that.
08:52 Do you, you know, bring them in early?
08:54 Do you show the entire film?
08:57 Do you make people take notes on it?
08:58 Do you do a self-scout?
09:00 But I do think that after talking through each other
09:04 and knowing our team, I do think we have a really good feel
09:07 for our group because we are a small number,
09:11 and we were even smaller today than usual.
09:13 But I think we have a really good feel
09:15 for what they need the most.
09:16 All right. Thank you, all.