Ben Howland Last Quotations

He is so sharp mentally, it's incredible. But the key to his run was recruiting good players who were good people. Good people last a lifetime.

He's a great kid and a great competitor. He's going to bounce back and be great in the NCAA Tournament. We need to beat Arizona, but it's hard to beat a good team like Arizona three times. They've improved since we've last seen them.

Last time I checked, Larry Brown started in college, for example, and he might be one of the top coaches.

Our team is definitely playing its best basketball right now. If you look over the course of the last eight games, we've really been playing great defensive team basketball.

I thought that in the first 10 minutes we came out a little tight. In the last 30 minutes, we were terrific.

When I finished watching the tape from last year I was embarrassed with our effort. I am so much happier with where we are now than a year ago.

With the last play of regulation, we didn't have any timeouts left and I am trying to be judicious, but also use my timeouts to the best of my ability. After all that and then go into overtime on a great shot by Robertson is just a testament to these kids' character.

We had a seven-point lead at the half, but then we came back out and got off to an unbelievable start against an NCAA tournament team. And although we won by 12, the score is not indicative of the fact that we were pretty much in control the last 16, 17 minutes of this game. It was really fun.

Although we won by 12, the score was not indicative that we were pretty much in control the last 16, 17 minutes. It was fun.

The last three games, we've essentially been playing all freshmen and sophomores.

They both are premier players that have grown through a lot of adversity already. Both of them got a lot of experience last year and playing over the summer.

I don't think Stanford's streak means that much to most of our players. What it says is how good their program has been over the last 15 years. They execute extremely well, and they come to Pauley with a lot of confidence. We have to be ready for that, as well as the start of Pac-10.

It's that magic third year. That's the plan. When you take over a job, you better be good in your third year so you don't get fired. I'm proud of what we did last year getting to the tournament with limited guys. We had four guys on the perimeter playing down the stretch. Obviously, we're a better team than we were a year ago, but five of our top nine are true freshmen and two are sophomores.

The last seven, eight games, Ryan is playing the best basketball of his career.

The last time I checked, we were one of two schools ... that had played against five top 50 teams in the country. The RPI that they're using for the NCAA tournament is largely based on strength of schedule and we were fourth out of 330 teams, so we've absolutely been tested.