Texas at Georgia

WHERE: Stegeman Coliseum

WHEN: Saturday, 2 p.m.

RECORDS: Georgia 9-9, Texas 11-8

TV/RADIO: ESPN2 (Roy Philpott, Jon Sunvold); Georgia Bulldog Radio Network (Scott Howard, Chuck Dowdle, Tony Schiavone); Sirius/XM (113/191)

When your team is struggling to find wins, keeping focused on the big picture isn’t always easy to do.

That’s the challenge facing Georgia head coach Tom Crean, whose Bulldogs take a break from conference play to host Texas in Saturday’s SEC/Big 12 Challenge.

Tip-off at Stegeman Coliseum is set for 2 p.m.

“We need to avenge the Sugar Bowl,” quipped Crean during Friday’s interview session to preview the game. “I haven’t asked anybody over in football, but I feel responsible for that. Georgia needs a victory over Texas right now, and we’re excited for it. I think it’s going to be great.”

The Bulldogs (9-9) could stand some good news.

Georgia is 1-5 to start the season in conference play after opening SEC play with six consecutive games against teams ranked in the Top 50 of the new NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) rankings, including four losses in a row.

Although the stretch hasn’t done the Bulldogs’ record any favors, Crean said the string of losses hasn’t kept him from constantly reminding his players about the big picture and why he’s confident about what the program will ultimately become.

“Absolutely, but I don’t think you dwell on it because you can’t see that far ahead,” Crean said. “However, absolutely, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t talk about what we want to be. I don’t talk about what a championship mindset is, but that’s exactly what I do in the locker room.”

A lesson taught to him by mentor and former boss Tom Izzo of Michigan State jumps immediately to mind.

“I think Tom Izzo coined the phrase, 'Players play, tough players win championships,' and it wasn't long before we were winning championships at Michigan State. We were training and developing, coaching them to have that mindset and be that type of player,” Crean said. “That’s the big picture. The big picture is staying absolutely locked into the details of the day, details of the drill, details of the play, details they see in the film. That’s going to create the bigger picture where they can understand the details that become the fundamentals.”

Senior Derek Ogbeide says the players continue to buy into the lessons that Crean is trying to teach.

“We talk a lot about it, the mindset of just continuing to move forward—including myself,” Ogbeide said. “We talk a lot about continuing to fight in spite of some of the disappointments we’ve had, which can be tough for young people our age. We believe that. We’ve just got to stay determined and keep pushing.”

That’s not all.

“There’s really no fun in enjoying the game without being fundamentally sound and detailed. You can run up and down the court and play, but you’re not going to win very much,” Crean said. “You’ve got to keep getting the fundamentals and the details down because we might play well for 30 minutes, we might play well for 32 minutes, we might play well for 22 minutes, but we’ve got to play well for 40, 45, or 50. So that’s what you continue to shoot for.”

That includes continuing to get better individually, which Crean says is a daily mission for he and the rest of Georgia’s staff.

“There’s not one day when we get away from what we want the program to look like, because if I was just concerned where we were for each and every game, we’d never work individually to improve their shooting. We’d never work to improve their driving, their ball handling, passing to the post, passing on the move, developing weak hands,” Crean said. “That’s the cornerstone of our program is the individual improvement that comes into a collective team winning environment.

INJURY UPDATE: Crean said sophomore Nic Claxton has been cleared for Saturday’s game after colliding with teammate Jordan Harris Wednesday at LSU. Unfortunately, Harris apparently bore the brunt of the injury. According to Crean, it’s unclear whether or not the junior will be cleared in time for Saturday’s 2 p.m. game.

Game Notes

On what some of Georgia’s defensive issues were in game against LSU…

"You shoot 50 percent on the road and 53 percent from the field, you’d think you would have a pretty good chance to win. We didn’t have enough stops together. We had three stops in a row one time in the second half; that’s not enough, they’re too high-powered of a scoring outfit., So, as easy as it was for us to score, it was for them, too. And it just can’t be that way, and there were just too many times we let the disappointment of a bad pass, or a disappointment of a missed shot come down. We got beat one-on-one a little bit, and we’re not a one-on-one defense, right? So, you’ve got to come back and stand your ground, and you can’t get beat. When I see that, I’ve got to do a better job of getting guys out, like right now. I did a little bit the other night, but you can’t give up a play because you’re living in the last play. That’s immaturity, and that’s still one of our greatest weaknesses that we have. It’s not that they’re immature people, as much, but it’s that we’re immature in how we deal with success or failure on the court, because really what it comes down to is the old adage- it is the next play. And that next play is coming in real time and in seconds. It’s not football where you have 30 seconds to regroup to get ready for four to six seconds; you just don’t have that. It’s not baseball where you have time to get ready for the next pitch, or in between innings, right? It’s coming and, in the average game, there’s over six possessions in length before there’s a stoppage of play, on average. So, you’ve got to go. We’ve got to continue to grow out of it. There were times we did not defend— there were times we did— but we did not defend them as well as we needed to, and if we’d gotten three stops in a row a couple times, that would’ve really changed the game for us as close as we were because we were scoring."

On what is causing Georgia turnovers and how Crean is trying to clean that up…

"Well, I just looked at every live ball turnover- not the dead balls, where we turned the ball over with a travel or a charge or something like that, but a live ball turnover- since the Auburn game. We’re not strong enough with the ball is one thing. We’re trying to make passes that aren’t there sometimes. We’re not a shuffle-pass team. We’re not an “E'Torrion Wilridge, drive it and try to pass it inside to Derek,’ team. That’s not his role, alright? That’s not what we need. We need simplicity, and sometimes, again, it’s not being strong enough with the ball. Passing is a two-way game, right? It’s not just the passer, it’s the receiver, so you’ve got to shorten your pass, you’ve got to step into your pass; I mean, we could talk fundamentals forever. Some of it is just that, but the other part of it is we’re trying to make plays that aren’t there, right? We’re trying to make some plays in trapping that aren’t there, instead of just hitting the open man. So, we’ve got to get better at that, and there are some guys who are some bigger culprits, but I think we’re learning now, more and more the ‘Okay, this is the big picture.’ We know what we want the offense to look like. You saw some of it the other night with the cut. We’ve got to keep getting more and more to that, and eventually there’ll be more dribble. There will be more drives from guys. There will be more down hill from guys. There will be more ball screens, but right now we’ve got to keep looking at what gives us the best chance to utilize the players that we have on the court in the best way and how we can get them to understand. So, we want to play with freedom. We want to play with movement, without question. It’s not about trying to overcall plays or anything of that nature, but it’s trying to put people in personnel positions where they don’t have to do things that they shouldn’t do, can’t do or we have no intention of them doing. We’ve got to get them to understand that, but it ultimately goes back to the question you asked after one of the games. You asked me about playing so many players and getting into a rotation. When we get consistency is when we’ll have a rotation. We’re still searching for that, so that becomes part of it. That’s got to be the energy that drives you as a coach every day, and it does. How can we figure this out to give us the best chance? How can we get our game plan right, how can we make our offense and defense better? How can we give these guys the confidence to carry things out in a good way and the way they do in practice.”

On whether he will continue to shuffle the lineup…

"Yeah absolutely. If we had a best seven players or best eight players, I wouldn’t like doing that because I like to play more guys than that. I think it’s crazy in recruiting. We’re going to play a lot of guys, right? We’re going to recruit all these guys to play, then all of a sudden, you get to college and oh, you’re only playing seven guys. I don’t like to do that. I want guys to develop and play, but, do we need more of a playing group? Here’s what we need. We need more, when you go in to play, I know you’re going to wrestle and I’m putting you back in. That becomes a rotation to me, not, you know, that wasn’t very good and those mistakes are killing us, I’m not sure I can go back with that right now. I mean, you get that type of consistency, and we need people that are clamoring for that. We need people that are playing more, and I keep saying this all-year long, are you a day-by-day player, or are you a day-to-day player? Day-to-day, you’re all over that map. Day-by-day, you build consistency, and we’ve got to get more of that."

On the defensive challenge of Texas’ Jaxson Hayes…

:Oh, a tremendous shot blocker. Very good quickness. Moves his feet well. Great timing. Doesn’t seem to get sped up by the game, and we’ve got to move him around. There’s no doubt about that. We’ve got to make him move. [He’s] very, very comfortable playing the way that he wants to play. They’ve done an excellent job with him, and again, like I said, we’ve got to move him around."

O Amanze Ngumezi’s progress last game…

"I was definitely planning on, and this is where players have to understand sometimes, too, I didn’t start Derek [Ogbeide]. Derek was playing really, really well in the second half, and Amanze, when it becomes a switch-game and things of that nature is where he’s got to continue to grow, but it was nothing he didn’t do to not get back into the second half. It really was a matter of the way Derek was playing and the energy and the efficiency he was playing with and the fact that they were having trouble stopping him. He was moving well without the ball, but I thought Amanze had his best stretch there and certainly, if he continues that he’s going to continue to play more minutes and as I remind everybody, we’re one-third of the way through the conference season. There is a ton of basketball left, and they’ve just all got to continue to understand that."

On other reasons for lack of consistency on the court…

"I don’t know, like maybe because there’s not a guy to throw it down into that they know they’re going to get a basket like they had last year. There’s not a guard that bails us out of situations. I think what happens is when you don’t have that stabilizing guy that everybody knows, this is the guy that’s going to get it centered, Nic’s trying, there’s no doubt about that, that this is the guy that’s going to get it stabilized for us. I think that’s part of it. The other teams have those guys, and they don’t just have one or two of those guys, they have three or four of those guys, and we don’t have that, so we’ve just got to continue to understand that the pass is key. The movement without the ball is absolutely paramount, that the ball can’t sit somewhere. It’s not like the ball is sticking. We’re not a team where guys are trying to size up and go. We’ve had some of that, but we don’t have much of that. It’s our decision making. We’re making some errors because we’re trying too hard at times, and that’s part of the maturity process, too. Maturity’s not always a bad word. It’s a realistic word. It’s part of it. And immaturity is not a dirty word in the sense of who they are as people, it’s the fact that they are growing into a style of play, so when I say that, I don’t say that as an insult, I say that as a reality. It’s the same thing I say to them, but how we’re going to go through it is what’s most important. You’ve got to get better day by day, you cannot continue to make the same mistakes, but we’re not unlike a lot of teams in the country. We really aren’t. There are very few 40-minute teams when I watch basketball, very few, but the bottom line is, it doesn’t look that way because there are guys that are going and getting baskets that you’ve just come to rely upon and that’s why the guys are getting a lot of attention around the country or in the league because they can go and get a basket. LSU had numerous guys that when things broke down the other night, they could go and get a basket, and whether they were big or whether they were small, they’ve got an elite guard and yet, with three and a half minutes to go, we’re sitting right there, we just needed to string some stops together."