TRANSCRIPT: Everything Coach Beard said after the Rebels’ road loss to Auburn

OXFORD, Miss. — The No. 21 Ole Miss men’s basketball team found itself in a very hostile environment Saturday night as the Rebels dropped an 82-59 game at No. 11 Auburn in Neville Arena.

After the game, Ole Miss head coach Chris Beard met with media to discuss the game. Here’s everything Coach Beard said.

Coach Beard: Let’s start and congratulate Auburn on a really well-played game tonight in a lot of ways. It’s my first time to come here as a competitor and I’m super impressed with the environment. I’ve been in a lot of the best environments in college basketball, and this was as good as anything I’ve seen in a late-January conference game. So, great crowd.

I thought Auburn played really well. I don’t think their defense gets enough attention, (they’re) really, really hard to score against. You know, we came to Ole Miss with a lot of objectives to play meaningful games in March, and to get there, you’ve got to play some meaningful games in January and February. And I thought we made our part of the bargain in terms of having two top-25 teams playing here. Somebody told me today it might have been the first time that Ole Miss ever played Auburn with both teams ranked. So, a lot of good going on in our program as we build this thing in year one.

Obviously, we didn’t we didn’t take care of our end of the bargain today to make it a top-25 type game. But I would give Auburn the credit for that. (They are) very difficult to score against, (we had) season high turnovers tonight. And a lot of that was because of Auburn’s good play. So congratulate them on protecting their home court. I’ve still got a lot of belief in our guys. I believe we can play and win games like this. We’ll just have to get back to the drawing board, but congratulate them on a great home victory tonight.

Question: Coach, you mentioned Auburn’s defense was tough to score on tonight. What’s the message for your team going into your next matchup about offensive efficiency and maybe taking care of the basketball?

Coach Beard: Well, I think a couple things. One, we’ve got to stay the course. We’ve been a good offensive team in a lot of our segments and games this year. Tonight, obviously, we weren’t and it starts with taking care of the ball. Doesn’t matter what kind of defense you’re playing against or what your offense is doing or not doing, if you hand the ball to the other team, and you don’t get a shot on goal there is no offense.

So, obviously ball security wasn’t where we’d like it to be tonight, so we’ve got to take care of the ball. And I think just offensively, we had too many possessions where we were just kind of standing around. It was a low possession game. I don’t want to speak for coach, but with their full court pressure, you don’t get the number of possessions you normally get in other games. So with those games, there’s just a high priority to try to have great offensive possessions. And we did not early.

Media: It’s a pretty rare game where Allen (Flanigan) and Matthew (Murrell) didn’t get going. Was Flanagan pressing a little bit? Was he a little nervous? I mean, did you see anything different in him coming back here?

Coach Beard: No. The Flanagan family’s a lot of things — Nervous isn’t one of them. So Allen Flanigan was not nervous tonight. But I understand the question. I’ve been a part of a couple of these in my career and obviously a lot of emotion, and give Auburn credit, they were emotionally attached to this game. We were too.

Our guys came to play. I thought we had a great plan. We didn’t execute it well at all, obviously. But a lot of our misfortune tonight, give Auburn credit. You know, it wasn’t like our guys showed up and weren’t ready to play. We were. I thought Auburn played great to start the game. The basket was huge for them when we finally started settling down and getting some stops. You know, it’s just those runs that you get here, and I think the home court advantage they have here contributes to some of those runs.

Next Up

Ole Miss returns home for their next game, hosting Arkansas in the SJB Pavilion on Wednesday, January 24 at 8 p.m. on ESPNU.

Evelyn Van Pelt

Evelyn has covered sports for over two decades, beginning her journalism career as a sports writer for a newspaper in Austin, Texas. She attended Texas A&M and majored in English. Evelyn’s love for Ole Miss began when her daughter Katie attended the university on a volleyball scholarship. Evelyn created the Rebel Walk in 2013 and has served as publisher and managing editor since its inception.