Golden Nuggets: "We need to find some mental and physical toughness"

After SJSU's surprising 68-66 upset over the Cal women's basketball team last night, Joanne Boyle was not too happy. 

"San Jose State did a great job. I thought they brought everything you need to win a game. Toughness and energy. We came in and played the first six minutes like we should have and then we checked out. I'm embarassed. I told them the one thing I have always taken pride in is that we've always had tough teams. People would knock you on your butt before they'd get an offensive rebound in the last two minutes of a game. You might have four fouls and five turnovers, but you knew when you left, you had played your butt off. We are soft. Physically and mentally, from top to bottom, we were soft tonight. And we have a habit of that. Being soft and not being mentally tough will get you a loss to anybody. That's where we are right now."

"We need to find some leadership on this team. And we need to find some mental and physical toughness."

"I can't lead them. I am obviously not doing a good job with them in teaching them that being soft is not acceptable at this level. I am not asking them to make baskets. I am not asking them to do anything but play hard and rebound. When someone comes into your gym and scores 32 on you. And the team scores 36 points in the paint and no one is over 6 feet tall, that is a problem. I need to step away and they (the team) need to figure out what they want for their season. Or tell me how to coach them better."

On the third straight game shooting 50% from the freethrow line

" Kids have to be in the gym shooting freethrows. That is not necessarily something you take an hour out of practice to shoot freethrows. Part of it is are they focused at the line? Are they working on it? Do they understand the importance of them? If you don't learn a lessen after the first one (game shooting poorly from the freethrow line), and you don't learn it after the second one, I don't know what to tell you."

After the jump, ESPN rates the bowl matchups, men's bball sends a record crowd home disappointed, and more.

Cal Football

• ESPN ranks the Poinsettia Bowl at 14th among the most exciting matchups.  Like Mandel said yesterday, this bowl will be more exciting if Best makes a surprising return.  Most of the Pac-10 bowls are in the top half of the rankings, though USC-BC came in at 18th and UCLA-Temple (assuming Army wins) was second-to-last.
• Ted Miller compares the pre-season and post-season all-Pac-10 teams. Syd, Anger, and Best, all pre-season first-teamers are not on the post-season team.  Mohamed made the jump up to the post-season team.

Cal Basketball

• The record crowd of 8704 was probably disappointed when the Bears blew out Pacific 79-54.  PC enjoyed the hostile road atmosphere, particularly when the crowd gets silenced following a big shot.  Farudo's game thread recaps how Cal took a commanding lead early on and didn't let up.