Jerome Allen: 'Hopefully we got it out of our systems'

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The eight Ivy coaches participated in the midseason Ivy League media conference today, offering their takes on non-conference play and the up coming Ancient Eight schedule. Here are coach Jerome Allen's remarks (italicized) along with some questions from various media:

I think the beauty of it for us is that we have an opportunity to play now for one of the things we set out for at the beginning of the year, and that is to be Ivy champs. And that starts this Friday. I think for us, coming off a loss last night, and eight out of our last 12 games were losses, for us we’ve just been trying to slowly but surely build the principles that it’s going to take to be victorious in league play.  We’ve got a combination of some veterans and some young guys, and I like when they all fuse together, when they all buy in. I’m excited for these guys, I think it’s a great time in their lives. It’s a great time for college basketball, It’s a great time for Ivy League basketball in particular. I look forward to seeing how things play out.

You’ve played a very tough non-Ivy schedule leading up to this, how much do you think that will help you as you get into Ivy League play?

I think it depends on who you ask on the periphery if you think the glass is half full or half empty. We could be a record of, say, 14-2 and not play anyone that is challenging or getting us ready for league play. Or we could have a record of where we currently stand and play at UCLA, at Duke, Pitt, Villanova, Temple, La Salle and say that’s the company we see ourselves in. So hopefully we can draw upon the experiences we’ve had thus far. But to be quite honest with you, that’s really all that I know. That’s kind of the standard for Penn basketball. We’ve had a tough schedule but to get back to where we want to be, those are the types of teams that we have to play and not only play and play close, but we have to beat. Hopefully it helps us going forward, but to be honest with you, I’m kind of disappointed in our results thus far playing against those teams.

Where do you see your team at this point, and what is it that you think you need to improve on as you get into the Ivy League?

We talk all the time as a staff about what do we stand for, what’s our identity. And we would like to say that we’re a pretty solid man to man defensive team, and that hasn’t always been the case thus far. We’ve shown in stretches, whether it be in halves, five-, six-, seven-, eight-minute segments that we can pretty much be a good defensive team. So I’m hoping from that standpoint that once we start league play, those thigns kick in and we really lock in and focus for a full 40 minutes on that end of the floor. And whether the ball goes in the basket or not, who knows, but at least if we give consistent effort on the defensive end, we’ll give ourselves an opportunity to win each and every game.

Zack Rosen was held scoreless last night in the second half. You depend so much on him, do you almost worry about that and tyring to get more complementary scoring and to take a little of the load off him.

It’s one of the things I thought about last night as I was elbowing my wife in the bed. I’d like to say that from his standpoint, I worry more about how he services the group than really scoring, although, I didn’t think he had a great floor game yesterday — I questioned some of the decisions that he made. Do Miles Cartwright and Tyler Bernardini really have to step it up and create opportunities for others? I think that’s the case, but all and all, those guys on the perimeter have opportunities to make plays that they don’t sometimes, and I think that affects how they operate down at the other end of the floor, and that shouldn’t be the case, so hopefully we got it out of our systems and we have an opportunity to come Friday night to right the ship, so to speak. I think our goal is not to win 14 games but to win one game 14 times and if we can just focus in on one game Friday night and then worry about things as they come.

You’ve got one of the best point guard’s in the league if not the best, but Columbia’s Brian Barbour is also playing very well, talk about that matchup between Zack and Brian and your thoughts on Brian’s game.

I think Brian’s playing extremely well, I’d echo that same sentiment. He does a lot for Columbia. He gets the guys the ball, he pushes the ball. But for us it’s not going to come down to Brian Barbour versus Zack Rosen. For us to be victorious Friday night we need five guys engaged in every action defensively, and five guys rebounding the ball and everybody not worrying about the next man’s job but worrying about their job. And if we get that for a consistent 40 minutes, I think we’ll be fine. Columbia is playing great basketball right now, but trying to make the game as simple as we possibly can and make it about our principles and not really about individual matchups.

For the rest of the audio from the conference, click here.