ASHEVILLE, N.C. – During one of Florida’s NCAA basketball tournament runs, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick made the trip to Gainesville, Fla., to talk with the Gators.
He likened the journey through postseason play to a horse race, where the outside chatter and expectations as to how a horse should finish might not match up to the result.
His message? Wherever you’re seeded doesn’t matter once the game starts.
“It’s the horse that runs the fastest that’s going to win the race,” University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men’s basketball coach Matt McCall said. “They don’t know what their odds are; they don’t know where they’re seeded; they don’t care. The horse that runs the fastest is going to win the race.
“In a horse race, horses can’t see to the left of them, they can’t see to the right of them. They can only see in front, and that needs to be our focus.”
His UTC team, the top seed in the Southern Conference tournament, faces Samford today at noon in the quarterfinals at the U.S. Cellular Center. It’s a position with which the Mocs are familiar, as they’ve earned a bye in each of the last two seasons only to lose to a lower-seeded team.
“We have to start with energy,” junior Tre’ McLean said. “We have to come out and be the more focused, the more connected group for 40 minutes. We can’t think about the media, before the game and after, or what happened in the regular season.
“We have to focus on that 40 minutes at the time.”
It’s been five seasons since the Mocs have won a game in a conference tournament, and they haven’t won a game in Asheville since claiming the 1995 championship here.
“Last year’s conference tournament has nothing to do with this one,” McCall said. “What these guys have done an unbelievable job of is focusing on the process, and that’s what we have to do. We have to take the game one possession at a time.”
The Mocs know they have to be ready to play a close game today.
The players have been talking about starting fast, as the opponents already will have played a game and dealt with the nerves that come with playing elimination games in a tournament.
“We’ve got to try to get over that,” UTC center Justin Tuoyo said. “We’ve played in big games this year, and it starts in practice. We have to have each other’s backs, because the spotlight is on you now. We have to get over the hump and know that how you’re feeling, the guy next to you is feeling the same way.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.