Tennessee basketball knocked off Norfolk State 67-52 in both teams final games before opening up conference play this weekend.
The Vols jumped out to an early lead and Norfolk State never truly threatened but the Spartans still played Tennessee closer than any opponent besides Illinois so far this season.
Following the game, Norfolk State coach Robert Jones discussed how his team kept it close, compared this Tennessee team to last season’s and much more. Here’s everything Jones said.
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Opening statement
“You know, it was obviously a hard fought game, a tough game. Tennessee is the No. 1 team in the country for a reason. We don’t take any solace in being close. That’s not the fabric of our program. But I think outside of Illinois, I think this was the closest game they had all year. And I know they played some high majors and things like that, so we could take a little bit from from that. But once again, we had a couple mental breakdowns. And Tennessee, you can’t have that against the No. 1 team in the country and it cost us at the end. So we’re gonna go back, regroup and get ready for conference play.”
On how he feels about his Norfolk State team going into conference play
“We love our chances, but I think that just like with any conference, conference play is tough. That’s why you’re all in the same conference, right? A lot alike opponents. But I do think that we’ve played one of the tougher schedules in the conference. So we’ve seen a lot of different styles all across the country. And now we get into like territory. So I do like our chances in the conference this year.”
On how this Tennessee team compares to the one Norfolk State faced last season
“I think that this is obviously a good team. They’re No. 1 for a reason. But I do think last year they had maybe a little bit more firepower in a sense. Because they obviously had Dalton Knecht, he’s going be in the NBA player a long time. Even the young man forgot his name, (Jonas Aidoo) something or other. The big fella in the middle might have been a little bit more dynamic than the guy that got now. But hey, (Zakai) Zeigler still is here. He’s the engine. I don’t know how many assists he had today, six, so he made a lot of things happen for them. So with him coming back, you’re always gonna have a chance with that.
But I do think that they’re probably a little bit more balanced. Last year might have been top heavy. And I know last year we lost about like 37 here. So I don’t know if we are better and they’re worse or, I don’t know. Or maybe we had a better game plan coming in this year than we did last year.”
On what he saw on film from this Tennessee defense
“The biggest thing, what I did was I tried to watch most of the mid-majors that they played. Because I know some mid-major only scored like 30 points, 32 points and things like that. And I thought that we could do a little bit better than that. And we did. But we were trying to exploit some of their hard hedging, so we did a couple actions to get them off the hard hedge a little bit, which got to open shots. We had seven open shots in the second half that we just blew, we just missed, and it could have been a totally different basketball game.”
