More Friday hoop notes

A few more thing to report from today’s media availability. If you want off-beat, painful interview material, scroll to the end:

- The events of the past 48 hours – a stirring home win over No. 24 Florida, hero Zam Fredrick appearing on ESPN2, people jumping full-force on the basketball bandwagon – can have a way of exploding some egos.

But coach Darrin Horn thinks his players “better be” staying humble.

“Last I checked we hadn’t accomplished anything,” Horn said. “We’ve got, what, 12 league games left, an extremely tough opponent coming in Saturday that is very dangerous. And the only way I know to be good is just to keep working. You do that through being humble and understanding what got you there.”

Dominique Archie thought the hullabaloo among the players stopped once they got to the locker room.

“Everybody was happy for the win, but we knew that was only a small step toward our main goal,” Archie said.

- Horn thinks the SEC may be getting short shrift lately.

“The talk about our league is it down, maybe relative to having two for-sure top 10 teams, maybe it’s down. Is it it as bad as it’s getting hit nationally, no way,” Horn said. “If the ACC is strong, for example, because of Virginia Tech going and winning at Wake Forest, then why isn’t our league stronger than it’s getting credit for, for the same reason? You just look around the league and what’s going on with scores: Florida’s top 25 and we’re able to get them the other night.”

The counter-argument is that the SEC is labeled as being down for the lack of a lot of nonconference quality wins (USC’s win at Baylor being one of the few), so an ACC upset is more likely to be heralded as a strength of the league, while an SEC upset gets the opposite reaction.

But Horn is defending his league, which any coach would and probably should do. Especially one whose team may be in contention for an at-large berth in the NCAA tournament.

- The above quote came when Horn was asked about the danger of his team taking Ole Miss lightly. He brought it back to the point of not overlooking anybody.

“I don’t think you can take any game in league play that way,” he said. “You look at Ole Miss, this is a dangerous basketball team. They’ve got two explosive guards, they’ve got bigs that can put it on the floor and make plays. They’re athletic, they’re going to throw different defenses at you.”

He could also point to this very game last year: Ole Miss was ranked and thought it was pretty good when USC, which was struggling, and the Gamecocks went in there and won.

- The Gamecocks have given up a lot of backside layups lately, especially in the first half of the Florida game. That’s a downside of the defensive strategy, which is aimed at forcing turnovers and bad shots elsewhere on the court.

“It’s a fine line based on the particular game and the situation,” Horn said. “We gave up one late the other night late in the game that we didn’t want to. But at the same time over the course of the game we thought that was a big game towards us playing well. It made us aggressive, we did create some turnovers, we did speed them up, forced some guys to take some shots they don’t normally shoot, maybe rushing some shots. So there is a trade-off to that effect.

“We’re probably not ever going to lead the league in field goal percentage defense, because that’s not necessarily our style,” Horn said. “Does it need to be better than 54 percent consistently, yeah it does.”

- And now the humorous part of our blog. Maybe.

Archie is one of my favorite guys, for a lot of reasons. But sometimes in these group interviews it can be clear he’s ready to go. Like today:

RADIO GUY: What are your impressions of Ole Miss?

ARCHIE: Hmm. (Thinking a second). I don’t really have any impressions of them.

RADIO GUY: What do they do, or what have you seen of them on film?

ARCHIE: They play basketball.

RADIO GUY: That, that’s good to know.

NEWSPAPER WRITER/BLOGGER: You seen any film of their football team?

ARCHIE: Umm. I watched a couple of games.

ANOTHER NEWSPAPER WRITER/BLOGGER: What do you remember about that game last year that was a good moment for you, for the team?

ARCHIE: A win. We got an SEC road victory, something we haven’t been able to do often here.

FIRST NEWSPAPER WRITER/BLOGGER: That was a big moment for you. The game-winner down there.

ARCHIE: Yeah, I guess you could say that.

I guess you could.