Justin Joyner previews Rutgers

We're going to find out. I mean, obviously you think about what's harder to handle, success or failure. It's hard to handle success. I think it's much harder to handle success.

So it's going to be a challenge for us. I do think we have the leadership obviously with our staff, but also with our returners and with our older players. You know, they understand that, you know, you have a target on your back and there's a standard that we've set. I think obviously playing in Vegas and playing at the level we did it, I think it's on us now to cement that standard. That's what it's going to look like when you play against Michigan.

Well, I'll start this like, you know, a lot's been made of the Gonzaga game. Like, we have an unbelievable staff, you know, we talk about like matchups, right, from a player perspective, but I would say like, you know, with our staff, which starts at the top with Dusty, but like, I feel like we're going to compete at that matchup every night.

So we have a really good staff. And, you know, once I finished San Diego State, me and Drew had San Diego State together. I jumped right on to Gonzaga. It was just, you know, they had won by a large amount.

There was about 3 or 4 teams that we could play and Gonzaga was one of them. So I jumped on Gonzaga and yeah, it was— I mean, that night I didn't get much sleep, probably got 3 or 4 hours. And that was just because just trying to catch up and that was more spent on the current Gonzaga roster. I'd say that first night.

And kind of how they're playing, what they're doing. And once I had familiarized myself with how they're playing this year and their personnel, then I kind of dug into the kind of the St. Mary's files and watched a couple of St. Mary's games from my time there. Obviously, the 2019 game we held in '47, they were number 1 in the country.

I watched that game and then I watched the '23-'24 game and just dug into kind of what our rules were defensively, how we guarded them, the details of it. And then just trying to figure out how we can do it with our personnel. And ultimately, like, you know, clashing heads with Coach Beilein, clashing heads with Coach Church on the defense side of the ball, and just trying to figure out a plan that worked and then presenting it to Coach May and obviously him having trust in us and allowing us to try and execute it.

And then ultimately all the credit goes to the players for, you know, adjusting on the fly and doing their job at the highest level.

I'd say, you know, last year when we went to Florida, it was similar. Like we learned a little bit about our team with the quick turnaround. It's kind of the same now. Like we realize less is more for our team, if that makes sense.

Just like we don't want to overload them with stats. We don't want to overload them with coverages. We don't want to overload them with solutions offensively. We want to give them the nuts and bolts.

We want to try and prepare them for what's going to happen a lot in the game. And then allow them to be themselves and go execute at high level. I think kind of the theme for this team has been just hit singles, like just keep it simple, hit singles. We have really good players around us. If we can do the simple things at a high level, we'll be hard to beat.