All five men’s basketball starters address media after Ole Miss’ 81-71 loss to Mississippi State Saturday

OXFORD, Miss. — The No. 19 Ole Miss men’s basketball (19-7, 8-5 SEC) team fell 81-71 on Saturday against No. 22 Mississippi State (18-7, 6-6 SEC) at the SJB Pavilion. After the game, in an interesting move, head coach Chris Beard sent his entire starting unit to the postgame press conference: Matthew Murrell, Malik Dia, Jaylen “JuJu” Murray, Dre Davis and Sean Pedulla.

Here’s everything the Rebels had to say:

Question: Matt, just first off, what was the difference in your mind here today? Was it rebounding or something else?

Matt Murrell: At the end of the day, it was rebounding. I mean you can see the rebounding total. They doubled us up on the offensive boards and they outrebounded us by 12. You know, anytime you get more possessions than the other team it gives you a better chance to win.

Question: Just the second chance points that they got, how deflating is that?

Matt Murrell: I mean, we got to be better at the end of the day. You know, we always try to have more second chance points in the game. And we didn’t do that today.

Question: You know, really, for all of you, (State head coach) Chris Jans was talking about how he thought you guys came into this game playing better than they were. They put a lot of emphasis into rebounding, getting consecutive stops, effort, that kind of thing. Did you feel like they were the more aggressive team most of the night?

Sean Pedulla: Yeah, 100%. I disagree with him though. I thought we haven’t really been playing our best ever since that second half against Kentucky. I feel like since then, it’s just been on a steady decline. And when you play a team that’s playing for a lot right now and playing as competitive as they are, it’s going to show like it did today. So they were definitely the more aggressive team today in pretty much every, every category.

Question: What do you attribute the decline to?

Sean Pedulla: Just being complacent. Not fixing the issues that we’ve got to fix. Rebounding has been a struggle for us all year and it’s continuing to be a struggle. And we’ve got to turn it into something that’s a positive. Whenever you know what your weaknesses are and they continue to be your weaknesses, it makes it hard to win.  Easy to exploit if you’re the other team.

Question: All of you who are willing to answer, I know it’s kind of been a grind of this month-and-a half playing in two SEC games a week. But you know, just going into this kind of off week, per se, playing Saturday against Vanderbilt and all that, just what are you kind of looking to learn about yourselves as an organization through this next week?

Dre Davis: Obviously, we know we’ve got to play better. Just use this next week to get the information. Learn from it, obviously, we know our weakness, learn from it. Continue to get better, continue to stay together. Get ready for Vanderbilt.

Question: Y’all came off with back-to-back really tough hard-fought road wins, but came in tonight and looked a little tired. How tired were y’all today going into this game?

JuJu Murray: We weren’t tired at all. We just weren’t aggressive. It was just that simple. We weren’t tired at all. You’ve got to be aggressive to win, especially when you’re playing against teams like Mississippi State, just like Sean said, that are playing for a lot. You know, they’ve got a chip on their shoulder and we came in and we thought it was going to be easy. We have to play hard. It’s that simple.

Question: Given how much you guys have won, presumably what you’re playing for, NCAA tournament, that kind of thing, are you surprised that’s an issue on a night like tonight? Just simply aggression?

JuJu Murray: Yeah, for sure. You know, just like I said, when you’re playing against teams like Mississippi State that’s going to scrap the whole game for 40 minutes, and you come in on a slow start and then trying to chip away at the end, it’s not going to be too many times you’re going to come away with those type of games. So, you’ve got to just play harder. You know, we’ve got to, just like Dre said, accept the information that we got that’s going on this next week. Get ready for Vanderbilt. And that’s about it.