What Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett said after NCAA Tournament loss to Alabama
No. 2-seed Alabama defeated No. 7-seed Saint Mary’s, 80-66, in the second round of the 2025 NCAA Tournament on Sunday night in Cleveland, Ohio. After the Gaels’ 2024-25 season ended at Rocket Arena, Saint Mary’s head coach Randy Bennett spoke to reporters.
Below is everything Toole said immediately following the 14-point loss to Alabama.
RANDY BENNETT: This is an easy one. This is a great group of seniors, two of them sitting here, and Luke is the other one. As good as we’ve had in our program since I’ve been there. A great year. Really good team, one of our best that we’ve had since I’ve been there. Yeah, they checked about every box. They had a few goals up there, and they just kept checking the boxes. About the only thing we didn’t do was, we didn’t win the conference tournament championship but won the conference by three games. It’s so hard to do.
One of our goals was to be the first team at Saint Mary’s to win the league out right two years in a row, and we did that, and it was because all of these three seniors and the team. It was a special team. I have nothing but positive feelings. Obviously, you don’t like to lose, and we didn’t play good enough to win and we played a good team.
Alabama is very good.
I’ll miss coaching these guys. That’s the one negative is, I don’t get to coach them anymore. This was a team I looked forward to coming to practice to coach every day, and something wasn’t going well, all I needed to do was get to practice because it started going well as soon as I got there with these guys.
It was special. I’ve done it long enough. I know when it’s special. This group was special, and I just thank them and appreciate them for making it that way. It’s not that way very often.
Q. Randy, how do you look at first half, second half, what wasn’t working? Why did it take a while to get on track?
RANDY BENNETT: I’m not sure why, honestly. We didn’t shoot the ball well, I would say, and they did. I don’t know if it’s that simple. We didn’t turn it over, though. What did we have, 15 offensive rebounds to their eight? That’s pretty good. We had six turnovers to their 11 or 12. 11.
One of the big keys is taking care of the ball, we did a good job of. We didn’t score the ball — some of it has to do with them. They are long and they’re big around the basket.
But I don’t think we did a great job defensively, and I’m not sure why that is, because we’ve been a really good defensive team all year, one of the top five or ten in the country.
I’ll just credit them. You can’t get down 13 to start in the first half. You don’t want to spot them 13, which we did. We had it back to seven, had chances to get it even lower. But they held us off.
At the end of the day, you have to make some shots. We didn’t shoot the ball well enough to win that game, I would say, nor did we defend them well enough. They shot a good percentage on us to — for us to overcome that.
Q. What adjectives would you use to describe this team this season, and what would you say are maybe the two or three biggest highlights of the 24-25 season for the Saint Mary’s Gaels were?
RANDY BENNETT: The adjective I’d use to describe them is a tight team. Tight team. You know what? There’s a lot of tears in that locker room. I don’t think you have that anymore as much, people that really care about each other. They won the championship because their relationships were so tight, they’ll have for the rest of their lives. Wins and losses will come and go and they’re fun to have, but those relationships is what it’s all about, and these guys got it.
There was never any — what I said at the beginning was 100 percent legit. We never had a bad day. We might have lost a game. We never had a bad day. We didn’t have any junk in our locker room or program as far as guys not being all in. Even the guys that didn’t play as much as they had hoped, when it came down to — you had to do what was right for the team to win, and they were all there, and there’s some good players sitting on our bench.
But they were tight. They cared about each other.
That was the stuff that made the year special. We won championships. We won games. We advanced in the NCAA Tournament. We won 29 games, second most in Saint Mary’s history. We did a lot of things. But the thing they did was they did it right, in my opinion. That’s how it should be, and it still can be, and they proved to me it can still be done. That makes me happy.
Q. You guys have made it to the second round three times in four years now, which, as you’ve said, is very hard to do. What makes it even harder to try to break through that next barrier, besides fueled mostly by the opponent. And the unrelated separate question is, how you view this team going forward, Wessels, Ross, there were a lot of signs today of guys coming back who have made an impact, and I’m curious your view of next year.
RANDY BENNETT: The first question, how do you punch through? Your only chance to punch through is get in the NCAA Tournament. You have to do that first, and that’s where we’ve been — our group has been impressive. These three seniors did it all four years. Nobody ever at Saint Mary’s can say that. Nobody ever at Saint Mary’s can say three years in a row until these guys. We’ve got to keep doing it, just keep knocking on that door, and we’ll break through again. We broke through 2010 — shoot, I didn’t know it was going to happen that year, but it happened, and we were able to get Villanova, they were a 2 seed back then, and it happened. It could have happened today, and it could have happened a couple years ago against UCLA.
We’ve played some good teams. These guys were in the Final Four last year. But the more you do it, the more you feel like you can break through. I feel we can.
The second part of the question is the future. I like our guys. The future is always — it’s a little more unstable nowadays because of just the dynamics of college basketball. But we have some good young guys. Mikey is going to be a good player, and Jordan Ross is going to be a good player. Paul is a good player and he’s only a sophomore. And Harry is a good player. There’s others, too. Ashton is talented.
We’re sitting on some guys. I know we are. We have new ones coming in that’ll be good.
Looking forward to putting it together, but right now I can’t really wrap my head around it. Still dealing with the emotions of this team.
But I like — I think we can do it again. I think we can get back here. We’ll have enough pieces if we can get them to follow the lead of these three seniors and have that kind of leadership again next year.
I love my coaching staff, and I like the quality of kids we have, and we have enough talent to be — who knows. We can maybe be better next year. Maybe.
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