Ben Howland
Ben Howland
Benjamin Clark Howlandis an American college basketball coach for the Mississippi State Bulldogs and former player. He served as the head men's basketball coach at Northern Arizona University from 1994 to 1999, the University of Pittsburgh from 1999 to 2003, and the University of California, Los Angelesfrom 2003 to 2013. Howland became the first men's coach in modern college basketball history to be fired shortly after winning an outright power-conference title. He is one of the few NCAA Division I...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth28 May 1957
CityLebanon, OR
We had a seven-point lead at the half, but then we came back out and got off to an unbelievable start against an NCAA tournament team. And although we won by 12, the score is not indicative of the fact that we were pretty much in control the last 16, 17 minutes of this game. It was really fun.
I'm always concerned about him. He's one of the top players in our conference without question. He's an NBA player. He's an L.A. kid and he's always played well against us. We've got our hands full.
We're going up against the human fly-swatting machine.
I'm proud of our guys for seizing the opportunity against Gonzaga. That gave us a chance to play another day. And now we're moving forward.
The last time I checked, we were one of two schools ... that had played against five top 50 teams in the country. The RPI that they're using for the NCAA tournament is largely based on strength of schedule and we were fourth out of 330 teams, so we've absolutely been tested.
This will be unbelievably hard on everyone, even though, you know, religiously, we all understand that this is a celebration day of her life. But it's too short a life as far as we're all concerned.
This was a great gut-check win for our team, our program. To go through all that and have to go to overtime and to gut it out, it's a testament to these kids' character.
To me, the image of L.A. is hard-working, good people, who play together and are tough. (They) just happen to live in the greatest place in the world.
Thomas is the Shawn Marion of college basketball. And Shawn Marion is the greatest athlete in all of the NBA.
We had autograph seekers knocking on our players' doors at midnight the night before we played Memphis .
This was just a great gut-check win for our program. We beat an NCAA tournament team tonight, and to come out in this type of environment and play so well is a testament to our guys.
This team never, ever gets affected ... they just battle back. We're playing our best basketball of the year by far right now.
This team never, ever gets affected by it. They just continue to battle back. There's nothing that they haven't seen in terms of adversity that's going to bother them.
We were the tentative ones in the first half. I think we did a better job of playing way more aggressively at both ends of the floor in the second half.