Pop Isaacs Knows Texas A&M Is NCAA Tournament Team

March.

It’s the time of year that every college basketball player dreams of, and right now, it is what every single Texas A&M basketball player has on their mind, including transfer guard Pop Isaacs, who knows that it's go time with limited action remaining in the season before the SEC Tournament arrives and Selection Sunday is here.

“No team is probably going to want to play us in the first round,” Isaacs said. “The way we guard, the way we pressure. We play really hard. I think we play as hard as any team in the country. We’ve had some really close losses against teams that will be seeded really high in the tournament that will be seeded really high in the tournament in games that we probably should've won.”

Now is the time to prove it, with it being the last week of the regular season and even though there have been a few hiccups, highs and lows, this Aggies team is still in the locker room and in practice, locked in.

“I like our team’s mindset,” Isaacs said. “We watched the film, and we are going to correct the things we got to do to win the next game.”

Getting on Track

After dropping the game to Texas, it sent A&M to losing its last six of the last eight games, which isn’t the way a program wants to be playing basketball going into the final stretch before going to Nashville to play in the SEC Tournament and finding out if A&M’s name is called on Selection Sunday.

However, Isaacs is feeling confident after his previous outing, when he recorded 14 points in 26 minutes of action, and his coach told him it was the hardest he’s guarded.

“I play hard all the time, but it’s probably the hardest I’ve guarded all year,” Isaacs said. “Bucky told me that.”

Now, it’s a matter of carrying it into these final games and getting the other guards back to playing elite basketball they were playing before going into a shooting slump. Isaacs commented on what he thought the keys would be for getting his teammates going and the recipe for getting more production.

“Everybody needs to be confident, “ Isaacs said. “Be themselves. I think all of us have had really good spurts throughout the year, but I don’t know if we’ve all put it together so much at the same time, and we know we got to start putting it together if we wanna win and keep playing in March. We got to have everyone in the right mindset and confident in our games. Like Bucky says, we got to win our matchups.”

Regardless of what’s happened over the last month, it’s a new week and month to go out and prove that the program is ready for adversity and can be an NCAA Tournament team.

“There’s no doubt about it,” Isaacs said. "We’re an NCAA Tournament team.”