San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher reacts after costly loss to Grand Canyon

Being swept in the season series by Mountain West newcomer Grand Canyon didn’t totally mess up San Diego State’s chances of reaching the NCAA Tournament, but it certainly is going to make the Aztecs work for their sixth straight bid.

The Antelopes overwhelmed the Aztecs in the second half en route to a stunning 73-63 win at Viejas Arena that snapped SDSU’s 13-game home conference winning streak.

“We are the last Mountain West team to lose a home game in conference, and it was costly,” coach Brian Dutcher said. “It hurts losing at home, but we are not the only ones that had that happen to us. It is how we respond to it that is important. Now, we have to find a way to regroup, put this behind us, immediately learn from it, and get ourselves 100% bought into going to Fort Collins and beating Colorado State. If we do that, we will play for first place next week against Utah State. That's the Mountain West Conference. The top of this league is super competitive. We all have hard games left. Everybody at the top has hard games left, so we have to find a way to keep growing as a team.

SDSU dropped out of a first-place tie with Utah State atop the MW and now must hit the road to face Colorado State on Saturday. Tipoff is set for 3 p.m. PT and the game will air on CBS Sports Network.

The Aztecs were already on the bubble for getting into the NCAAs. They have three Quad 1 opportunities in the last five regular-season games, but their best bet for getting into March Madness would be to win the MW tournament and claim the automatic bid.

Here are the highlights of Dutcher and the players’ news conference:

Dutcher on what the team has to do now

“Try to stay positive. Learn from our mistakes. Take responsibility. I will take responsibility. Each player has to take some responsibility, learn from it and then move on. Grand Canyon is a good team, and I talked about that before the game. They are third in the conference in defense, and defense wins games. That is how we win. They are third in defense. They held us to 35% shooting and caused 13 turnovers. We had 10 turnovers at their place, and we had three more at home than we did on the road. We did not shoot the ball well from three again. They are really good at three-point defense. We were 3-18 there, and we only made three here.”

Dutcher on what he called “some uncharacteristic plays”

“Some of it is on us. I thought Reese (Dixon-Waters) had some fumbles where he had clean catches, but he fumbled the ball. (Miles) Byrd had a good numbers game, but we need someone else to match that with him. It does not have to be the same guy every night. It has to be Byrd and BJ (Davis) or BJ and Reese. Last game, Magoon (Gwath) stepped up, so it could be Magoon and another guy. But we did not have a second scorer who had an exceptional game today. We needed someone else to step up and match Byrd's numbers to have a chance to win. That happens some nights, but unfortunately, when it does not, it is hard to win. We really needed one of those other guys to step up and have a better game than they had. They were trying to do it. It was not like they did not want to score, but Grand Canyon has something to do with that.”

Dutcher on GCU’s three-point defense and physicality

“They might be the top three-point defense in the conference. If not, they are close. Nobody shoots well against them from three because they have size. They don't have to bring extra defenders into the paint. They are also super physical on the ball or on cutters. They push you over everything. Anybody who has been to a game at Viejas this year would have to say that GCU is probably the most physical team we have played. Straight physicality, pushing us over cuts, driving, and being really bodied up on us. We knew it was coming. It was not that we were surprised by the physicality. We prepared for it. Obviously, preparing for it and dealing with it are two different things.”

Dutcher on the urgency the team feels from NCAA Tournament bracket predictions

“I do not really stress over that, because if we play the way we are supposed to play and we win the Mountain West, we will find our way in there. Or we will play well enough to win the conference tournament and play our way in. I am not looking for anyone to give us a gift and get us in. We will play our way in, or we will play our way out. It is in our hands, and that is all I want. Our success will be based on how we perform, and that is all any team wants.”

Junior guard Miles Byrd on the offense tonight

“We’ve got to give credit to GCU. They made things really tough and they were really physical. It kind of took us out of our flow. All of us kind of rushed a few shots. We’ve got to take care of the ball. Tonight, we had some unfortunate turnovers. Stuff like that kind of adds up and affects the end of the game.”

Byrd on whether he thought this is where the team would be at this point in the season

“The conference tournament is three weeks away. We'll worry about that when it comes. We need to continue to stack days. If you ask me, I envisioned that we would go undefeated, but I would’ve been an idiot to say that. We need to keep trusting the process. I trust everybody in our locker room. We’re still down Elzie (Harrington), who's a big player for us and averages nine points. We lost tonight by 10, so who knows, maybe that makes a difference. We can't really start thinking like that. We're frustrated right now, but when we wake up tomorrow, we need to drop it. You've got to get in, watch some film and learn from it. We have a tough Colorado State team on Saturday, and then we have Utah State coming here next week, with us being only one game behind them. I'm still super confident in this team.”