Georgia’s blowout loss to Saint Louis in the NCAA Tournament is embarrassing enough. The Bulldogs’ comments after the game though somehow made this loss look even worse.
Guard Jeremiah Wilkinson was one of a few players who spoke with the media after the game. During his portion of the press conference he spoke about what went wrong during this game, and he refused to put any blame on Mike White and the coaching staff.
“Coach can say we could’ve been prepared different, that honestly wasn’t the truth. You know, we were prepared well for this game, we just honestly came out flat,” Wilkinson said via x.com. “I don’t know exactly what it was in the locker room, like what happened, but we weren’t ready to play today and we didn’t act like we wanted to be here and you’re not going to win a game in the NCAA Tournament when the other team wants to be here and we don’t want to be here.”
Jeremiah Wilkinson is ready to blame himself and his teammates after embarrassing NCAA Tournament loss
A lot of the ridicule has been focused on Georgia coming out flat and looking like they weren’t ready to play. Typically that blame would fall on the coach, but Wilkinson thinks it should fall on him and his teammates.
A coach shouldn’t have to get their players up for an NCAA Tournament game. It’s beyond obvious how important these games are because if they lose then their season is over. So no coach should have to inform his team just how big this game is.
But at the end of the day White still deserves to be blamed for how the team looked. It’s one thing to lose a close game where Georgia played really well and it’s another to get blown out from the second the game begins. And since Georgia looked horrendous from the opening tip a lot of the blame deserves to be thrown at White.
No one can escape this game without some blame. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and now Georgia faces a long offseason where they need to inward to see how they can correct their course going forward.