Mike Brey Notebook | Virginia Loss
Notre Dame basketball coach Mike Brey spoke following the 80-68 loss to No. 18 Virginia on Wednesday afternoon.
On the loss:
"They made big jump shots in the first 10 minutes and we made none of our open ones. The game was kind of over after that. Now, having said that, I'm trying to find some silver linings because we still have a lot of
games to play.
"To see (Trey) Wertz and (Cormac) Ryan in some kind of offensive rhythm, fitting in and feeling good playing with our key guys, I'll take that out of the second half today. I didn't think we could get over the hump against them. Tried to, but couldn't."
On cutting the UVA lead to 10 twice in the second half:
"We're fighting. We're trying. We're not the most confident group. You can't be when you've played the teams we've played and just haven't been able to go in the locker room and celebrate. We're not real confident.
"You can't inject that in somebody. I loved that we fought and made it interesting. They made every big three-point shot today, even some guys haven't made - Morsell made three. He's not been a great shooter.
"You tip the cap. We're fighting to get one. Saturday will be really hard to get because we're searching confidence-wise. Boston College is actually more confident than us because they just won a big game last night. I don't think they missed a shot."
On ACC schedule getting easier on paper:
"I talked about the next two games in three days, Boston College and Howard. Two games that are winnable, but they'll be very hard. We're not the most confident group, so they're going to be very, very hard.
"I tried to turn the page. I loved that we fought and got into some kind of rhythm in the second half, but they kind of knocked us out in the first half. It's been a long couple of days on the road.
"We've taken our beatings like a man, but as I told them in the last media timeout, I've been in this position many times in coaching when you're flat on the mat and you're trying to come off. When you do come off, those are some of the great memories of my tenure at Notre Dame when you're jammed up and we are. We're flat on the mat."
"It makes it hard. These two teams that beat us are better than us. If we played them again, and we don't play them again, in late February, maybe we could close the gap a little bit. We can't beat them yet. I've been very matter of fact with our guys and we're not going to sit there and jump off buildings. We're going to try and come back and figure out how to get one league win.
"I've used this speech over and over again, quite frankly, I'm a little tired of using it. When you coach at Notre Dame, you use it a number of times as many of you know."