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Florida Gulf Coast University 85 at UT Arlington 78
Saturday, December 9, 2017 - Arlington, Texas

POSTGAME QUOTES

UTA Head Coach Scott Cross
"I was a little disappointed defensively. We weren't locked-in mentally. Our guys (seemed) more concerned about the officials than playing the game. We preach all the time to control the controllables. You can't control the officials. From my view, they did a fine job. I didn't see any issues (with the officiating). They may have missed a couple on our end. They probably missed a couple on the other end. You have to play basketball. That's the bottom line. We didn't do that. When you blame others, you aren't going to win basketball games.

"(Erick Neal) is a guy that wants the ball in those situations. He hit a couple of big ones that got us back in the game. He needs to have a bit more discretion at times. We want to give him freedom and want him to play loose. But, once you get a game where (the result) is within striking distance you have to be a little more disciplined."

UTA Senior Forward Nathan Hawkins
"I think when we did hit adversity and we were down, we found a way to fight back at the end. We came together and got some stops down the stretch. Players hit big shots. In the beginning of the game, we were running our offense well. Defensively, we had spurts where we played the right way. We have some positives we can take from this. Overall, it wasn't the best game. But, we did have spurts where we ran our offensive right and played defense. We came together but it was a little too late.

"(Offensively) I just try to be aggressive when the team needs it. On the court, I try to be a heady player. I try to help the team organize and run things the right way. A lot of times I take a back seat. I try to stay aggressive to give the team something besides just another coach-type player on the floor."

FGCU Head Coach Joe Dooley
On how his guys played tonight: "We obviously had some stretches where we were really good, we had some stretches where we weren't really good. It's obviously hard to guard Hervey and Neal, they can make plays and just when you think it's over, it's not. I thought they had a stretch at the end where they put us on our heels but we built a big enough cushion to sort of withstand it."

On FGCU's game plan coming in against Neal and Hervey: "Not to let them have easy point. Their gonna get their points because their too talented. We wanted to try and make them take difficult shots and then I thought offensively for the most part I thought we moved the ball pretty well, even though we turned it over a lot, but I think we moved the ball pretty well and shared it. We had 14 assists on 28 field goals which is a good stat."

On FGCU's next step as a team: "Get home for exams this week, we gotta get some guys in practice. We need to practice. We've been playing a lot and we need some practice time, we need to get everybody healthy. We added another body this week, Michael Gilmore gets eligible, Brian Thomas is getting his hand taken care of and hopefully we can get some practice time and bring some guys back into the mix and see if we can get better this week."