January 17, 2000
A&M HEAD COACH MELVIN WATKINS: "When we walked out of the tunnel and saw the crowd, that is the way we want it every night. We had some good moments and a lot of good looks. Kansas constantly kept the pressure on us and eventually it wore us out. Roy (Williams) told me he thought the kids played hard. Rebounding was one of the keys for Kansas tonight. We got lost on some assignments. We were in position and they would tap the ball to their teammates. They had great balance, but they have been doing that all year. Jamaal (Gilchrist) did a heck of a job handling their pressure. We did a good job of running our offense against their half-court defense in the first half. I have the fortune to see out young players every day. We are going to continue to get better."
A&M GUARD JAMAL GILCHRIST: "In the second half we kind of got fatigued. They had 12 guys and were wearing us down. We got some good looks, but our shots were just not falling. That was a great team we played tonight, very good. They wore us down, rotated guys in and just wore us down. Coach (Watkins) said they would come with the pressure because i was a freshman. I took the tape home and watched it. I knew it was coming.
"I've been looking forward to this night all my life. It just doesn't get any better than this. Once the ball got out there, i was fine. We had a lot of great looks and missed shots we normally hit. They just didn't fall for us. Some nights you hit them and some nights you don't. The real difference tonight was offensive rebounding."
A&M FORWARD TOMAS RESS: "Their pressure got up and they had 12 guys to play. They were more fresh. They would have one timeout and change five guys. They were just more fresh than we were. Unfortunately we lost, but I felt pretty good out there."
KANSAS HEAD COACH ROY WILLIAMS: "We were trading baskets with them [A&M] at the beginning of the game, and we can't afford to do that. We just needed to go down and get some stops on defense. It was not a very smooth game for us on offense. We turned the ball over more than I can ever recall. We were not very sharp on offense."
On Bernard King's 1-10 three-point shooting: "We've tried to work on in practice taking the other team's best shooter and shutting down his field goal percentage. We made it very difficult for him [King] to score tonight."
KU GUARD KENNY GREGORY: "It was a big win for us tonight. Any road win in the Big 12 is a big win. We are trying to separate ourselves from everyone else in the conference. We are going to take it one game at a time no matter who we're playing."
KU FORWARD DREW GOODEN: "They [A&M] came out playing good defense on us tonight. They guarded the wings very well. We watched film, and they hadn't done that before. We went to a zone defense and tried to mix up our defenses. I think they got winded, and we took over in the second half."