What Mark Kellogg Said Following the Loss to North Carolina

The No. 6 seed West Virginia Mountaineers (25-8) were 13-54 (24.1%) from the field as the third-seeded North Carolina Tarheels (29-7) did enough on the offensive end (36.4% FG) for the 58-47 victory.

West Virginia head coach Mark Kellogg met with the media following the game and discussed the Mountaineers' performance.

Opening Statement

First and foremost, a ton of credit to (North Carolina head) coach (Courtney) Banghart - that team - what they’ve done - their performance tonight. I thought it might be a game a little bit like that to be honest. It was two elite defensive teams. I thought it might be a little bit of a slugfest.

I certainly thought we had better offensive performance in us, and it just wasn’t our night on the offensive end, and certainly, they had a lot do with that. Again, congrats to them and good luck as they move forward.

I’m just so proud of our group. I’m proud of the seniors. We always talk about living a legacy, leave things better than what you found [it] or whatever it was when it started at whatever place that is and I think these guys did that.

We’ve had a heck of a run. We had a great season. Did we fall a little bit short on some of our goals” Yes, we did, but that’s sports. That’s life. In this tournament in particular, only one team is going to finish with a win. We’re not going to be that one but like I said I couldn’t be more proud. A special group of players.

What it takes to advance to the Sweet 16

Win more game, I guess. Play the schedule, win the games – the right ones. For us, we win didn’t win enough probably in the quad one [Net Rankings] to get the home game. I think we’re close. Obviously, we’re closer now than we were a year ago. I think we’re at the doorstep.

I keep saying every time I get into this game though, the advantage of playing at home is significant and that’s the rules of the NCAA, then we need to continue to work really, really hard to see if we can’t get one of these in Morgantown because I think that environment would be ridiculously off the charts and be so much fun for our community and our state. So, we’re going to go to work on that.

The offense’s struggles against the Tarheels

We thought they were going to work really hard to limit (junior guard) Jordan (Harrison) and (senior guard) JJ (Quinerly) touches in the paint. They have bigger bodies, so they were going to take up a little more space. They were playing of (senior forward) Kyah (Watson) a little bit. I think (senior forward Alyssa) Ustby, that was her matchup, so she was not completely at the three-point line.

The other night, I thought we got to the rim about when we wanted to. That was going to be more difficult tonight, so we spent talking offensively about moving it, make it go side to side maybe first. We had some screening actions that we wanted to get to. At times we did, at times we didn’t trust it. Kept writing that on the board that ‘we got to trust each other’.

I thought when we cut, we got some really good layups, but it just wasn’t enough. We had some good looks from three, some were force that were bad possessions, but I thought we had some good looks, and we knew we were going to have to make some threes to probably win this game. I thought we needed seven or eight threes to probably win this game.

Opening Statement

What it takes to advance to the Sweet 16

The offense’s struggles against the Tarheels

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