Jan. 16, 2010
Recap | Box Score | Photo Gallery 1 
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Iowa Head Coach Todd Lickliter
Opening statement…
“I thought Eric May and the rest of the guys did a pretty good job on Talor Battle. He scored 31 points but Eric did a good job. He is just so hard to handle. I thought we did a decent job of keeping them off the glass which is really hard. They’re good in transition, Battle is hard to contain and they’re very hard to keep off the glass. In those areas it wasn’t perfect but it was good enough. I really like this team, and I’ve said that all along. They have good grit, they care about playing the right way, they care about one another, they’re good guys and they just gave a great effort, but it wasn’t perfect. They had some miscues, but we didn’t let that define us. We did what we needed to do defensively, so it was a well-earned win against a good team.”
On May’s block just before half…
“It was really a great play. It was a very athletic play. It was a terrific play. He didn’t feel sorry for himself, he didn’t stop, but he continued to play and that’s huge. It’s never going to be perfect; the game is too hard to be perfect. After Eric made the play, we turned around, gave it to Aaron (Fuller) and he scored so the turnaround just on Eric’s effort and talent was amazing.”
On Aaron Fuller’s performance…
“I think he finally has two good wheels. He’s sore; he’s had a bad ankle. If you look at him, you can see how hard he’s worked in the off-season. He was always a good offensive rebounder but now he has the strength to add to it. You can’t ask a kid to get double-doubles all the time but as long as he keeps going to the offensive glass like that, he’s going to be very productive. He has a great knack for positioning himself in the right spots. There are guys that can rebound the ball. When it comes to them, there are guys that can rebound out of their area. Aaron has a great reach and I think he can rebound out of his area a little bit. These guys he’s going against are great rebounders also. It was a great game for Aaron, no question.”
Penn State Head Coach Ed DeChellis
Reliance on Talor Battle in the end…
“Well, we really couldn’t get much from anybody else. We had some guys who had some open shots and they missed them. I don’t think that was down the stretch. I think it was the last six minutes of the first half where we just really relaxed. We were up 11 and we just really relaxed and three or four minutes and they had the lead going into the second half. Our young guys, they don’t understand how hard you have to continue to play, you can’t relax and you’ve got to stay focused. That was a frustrating part for me. He’s [Battle] a great player. He had 31 [points] and 7 rebounds so he leads us in rebounds and he leads us in scoring. We’re not getting a whole lot from any other guys. We have open shots and we don’t make them and sometimes that’s the game. You’ve got an open shot and someone’s got to drill it and when you don’t, someone else makes a shot. You know, it’s a possession game and we haven’t been able to make the basket we needed to make when we need to make it.”
On Chris Babb
“He broke his finger, his index finger, and he just really couldn’t shoot the basketball. He broke it coming into the game. He was 0-6, and I just didn’t think he had it. He had all zeros the first half and didn’t rebound the ball for us so we had to go a different direction.”
On Aaron Fuller’s rebounding
“Yeah, he really hurt us on the glass. We knew that going in he was the best offensive rebounder. We talked about it for two days, but we just didn’t execute. We didn’t keep him off the glass. Credit goes to him. He did a good job of getting on the glass. I think he had five or six rebounds offensively. That was really the key to the first half. I thought the first half we guarded them pretty well, but they just kept scoring on broken plays. A loose ball we didn’t pick up and they swing it around and someone gets a three, an offensive rebound, which is a good play, don’t get me wrong, but I thought we had a lot of loose ball plays where we didn’t come up with the ball and someone would swing it around and someone else would make a timely shot for them which was important for them.”