Clemson vs. Gardner-Webb Postgame Coaches’ Quotes

Nov. 11, 2011

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Clemson Head Coach Brad Brownell

Overall thoughts: “It was a good opening night for our guys, in a lot of different ways. I thought the Gardner-Webb kids really competed. They played really hard. They didn’t back down at all, physically, and obviously had a good run. We let our guard down when we were up 26-13. They got some confidence, made a couple of plays, we had some bad turnovers that led to a couple of baskets and we go into halftime and they had all the momentum.

“So we need to face a little adversity, and we got some. I thought our older players responded. Defensively, we were tremendous in the second half. Our guys really bared down and held them to 15 points. It took them a long time to score, and especially to make a field goal. I thought we did some better things. We played a lot of the older guys a lot of the minutes, so we executed a lot of things really well offensively; we just had some careless turnovers. The bugaboo for tonight is that we can’t have 18 turnovers in a game like this.

“But all in all, I thought it was good for us to play a team like this that was physical and got after us a little bit. I thought that we responded out of the second half and finished off the game pretty well.”

Gardner-Webb Head Coach Chris Holtmann

Overall thoughts: “In the first half, I thought we made better decisions with the ball. Toward the end of the half, we were able to get out running a little bit and get some points in transition. On defense, we were able to get a couple stops which allowed us to really get on a run and make things close. In the second half, I think they just imposed their will and turned it up offensively on us. I thought they dictated the shots that we took in the second half and that’s a real credit to Brad (Brownell) and his staff. I thought they really took us out of what we wanted to do and take shots that we didn’t want.”