Nov. 25, 2014
Recap | Box Score | Notes | USATSI Gallery 
Vanderbilt head coach Kevin Stallings
Opening Statement
“I’m happy to win. Not every game is going to be a masterpiece, this one certainly wasn’t. I thought their team played exceptionally hard. I did not think that we started the game with any energy or intensity. I thought they set the tone in the first four or five minutes of the game. We would get it our way then wouldn’t sustain, but we did some ok things. You look down and they shot 32 percent, and we did well behind the three-point line which is something that we emphasize. This was probably our worst performance of the four games, but I think of that had to do with them because they came at us and we didn’t have very many guys that responded. Some of them have reasons; Jeff Roberson is sick as a dog. Matthew Fisher-Davis’ foot is killing him. There were some other guys that didn’t have quite the same level as to why they didn’t play more physically or harder. We’ll try to work on things and get as many of them corrected as we can by Friday.”
On team injuries
“Jeff (Roberson) has been fighting an illness for a few days. We have something that is going through our team a little bit, but the foot, we’re fighting that to. He (Fisher-Davis) plays surprisingly well for a guy that doesn’t get that much practice time. Our trainer said that tomorrow we might be able to increase his practice time to about 30 minutes. Which kind of tells you what we have going on there. But that’s just two guys, I had a whole team that didn’t play how I’m accustomed.”
On 900th game with three-pointer
“When I first got here it used to bug me. I used to think that I owed it to everyone to hit a three, but this is 15-16 years in. So we’ve kept it alive for 15 plus years… So I’ve kept it alive. I used to let it bother me, but I don’t think about it anymore really.”
On challenge of first road contest
“It is because it’s the first time you go through playing outside your building. In almost every respect this will be a road game. We’re going up to play Rutgers in New York City, so it’s right beside where they’re from. But nevertheless there are travel challenges and guys that aren’t used to what happens on the road, that sort of thing. Everything that we do is sort of new for us, this will be no different.”
On affect Norfolk State switching from zone to man defense
“I think that we just came out flat. Just not as ready to play and I thought they whipped us inside in the beginning. They kind of set the tone in there, but we just didn’t have a good response. We didn’t have one big guy that played well. I don’t care what the numbers say. Shelby (Moats) didn’t get much of a chance, and he was fine in the time that he was in. But we didn’t play up front. Those guys are the ones with experience on our team. Those guys are the ones that are supposed to lead us, and we didn’t get any of that tonight unfortunately. So we’ll try to address that in the next couple of days at practice and see if we can impact it a little bit differently on Friday.”
