Basically what we told the guys is he's not here so we can't worry about it. The strength of this program is the team aspect, and they were able to pick each other up. |
Overall, obviously we would have liked to have qualified more and placed more. We had a couple of mistakes, we got caught in a couple of positions, but we also had some guys that came out and did it. |
That guy's ranked sixth in the country. He's the number-one guy in the Pac-10, he was the Pac-10 Champ last year and he beat Ray earlier this year, so for a lot of reasons that was a big match. |
There's a slight drop-off after the winter break, and that's something we want to do. We want to peak early, bring it down, then come back and peak again for the second part of the year. The guys are ready to start building their peak and that's right where we need them to be. |
We just need to be able to fight hard, have heart and believe that we can win when we're out there. We can't worry about what it says in the paper. We just have to realize that these guys put one shoe on at a time like we do, and go out and wrestle. |
We told [Scott] that you want to leave your fate in your hands by taking third. But taking fourth, we thought that maybe we could argue a little bit. But guys did real well the entire tournament, so there were a few guys that got left out. But that's why it's a wild card. |
We're just going to continue to focus on doing the things that we do. The worst thing to do is worry about what someone else is going to do and get away from what you do. So we want to focus on our core strengths and just wrestle hard. |