Richard Williams
“The expectations going into the season were high. We were ranked top-15 in the preseason. We had been to the Sweet Sixteen the year before, but some people forget that we lost three starters off that team. We had to get three new starters into the line up. Russell Walters and Marcus Bullard were on the team, but they were not full time starters. I remember that we won a lot of games early in the non-conference play. We lost to Arkansas-Little Rock on a last second shot. That Little Rock team had Derrick Fischer, who is now in the NBA, on that team. We weren’t playing well at that time and there were a lot of things that we needed to work on. When we lost to Kentucky at home, I think the players realized that what the coaches had been telling them were true that we needed to defend better and execute as a team. We went through a stretch there where we lost a couple of conference games after that lost to Kentucky. I think once Dontae (Jones) and Russell (Walters) figured out what their roles were, we became a much better team."
“I think coaches can say our goal is the national championship or our goal is to get to the Final Four, but for a program like Mississippi State that had never been there, they had only been to the NCAA Tournament a couple of times before that. To say that’s a goal is ok, but it’s somewhat of a stretch. You can have that as a goal, but is it a realistic goal. It’s realistic for Duke, Connecticut and North Carolina, the teams that do it on a consistent basis. We knew we were going to be good, we just didn’t know how good.”
“Just listening to the fans once it was all over, I think it was certainly something that made Mississippi State people proud and most of the state of Mississippi proud. For me personally, a guy that had been a Mississippi State fan since I was a kid and gets the chance to coach at my school and take my school to the Final Four was a very special meaning.”
1995 squad
“Just because you make it to the Sweet Sixteen one year doesn’t mean you can do better next year because it’s a different team, the match ups are different in the tournament. There are many times that good teams don’t make the Final Four because they match up with an opponent that may be a bad match up for them. Going to the Sweet Sixteen the year before, with the players we had returning in particular Darryl Wilson and Erick Dampier, if we could get consistent play from some of the new guys them we knew we could be good again. We certainly felt like we had a chance to return to the Sweet Sixteen depending on the matchups."
The early Championships
“I tend to think that was the team that set the tone for everything that has happened with Mississippi State basketball since that time. If you look at the history of the program before the 1991 season, they had been to one NCAA Tournament in 1963. They had played in the NIT in 1978 and had not been back to post season play till 1991. We had not won any SEC Championship of any kind since 1963, so I think winning the SEC Championship and getting to the NCAA Tournament in 1991made people realize that the Mississippi State program had reached a point where it was a legitimate program. We went to the NIT the previous year in 1990. I think that was the group of guys – Cameron Burns, Greg Carter, Carl Nichols, Todd Merritt that set the stage for the program because after 28 years of not winning a championship, we realized that we could do this. That was the team that I think set the standards.”
Special players
“The one I keep in contact with the most is Russell Walters and that is kind of a surprise because Russell and I butted heads so much when he played for me. I was a hard-headed coach and he was a hard-headed player and we had our differences, but now we are very close. Russell (Walters) is now in coaching and that has led us to become really close. He calls all the time for advice and just to talk. He has indicated to me that he understands much better what I went through as a coach and some of the decisions I made as a coach. He didn’t understand the decisions then, but now he does in the position that he is in.”
“I went to Italy last fall to spend nine days with Darryl Wilson and Tyrone Washington. Mario Austin was also over there as well, so I got to see him play. I enjoyed that time while I was over there.”
The Final Four experience
“When you go through it the first time, I didn’t exactly know what an impact it would have on our university and our state. The coaches are so busy planning for the next opponent and trying to get the team to play that next game that we didn’t understand the magnitude of it all, but we knew it was a big deal. The surprising thing for me was the amount of media attention focused on Starkville, Miss. and Mississippi State University along with the players and coaches. In Starkville, it’s not typical to have that kind of media focus.”
On Mississippi on the caps
“That was in direct response to questions. That’s what happens in the media; the questions are never printed, so all the people see is the responses to those questions. I think all the media wanted us to say that we weren’t respected. I think that’s the story the media wanted to write. The players and coaches that we competed against respected our program. It (the Mississippi on the caps) was a slap in the face to our university and to our team."
On the mayhem at the airport when the team arrived home
“That was a different experience. That’s one of the times where we started to think this is a pretty big deal. When the students started rocking the bus, I said it was time to get out of here. We left Tyrone Washington and Rick Stansbury at the airport, if they were not on the bus they had to find their own way home. It was an exciting time and everyone wanted to be apart of the experience.”
"T.J. Honore was one of the most under-rated players that I have ever coached. Marcus Grant was a great college basketball player and did well overseas in professional basketball."
On getting back to the Final Four
"It’s not easy for sure, if it was every school would do it occasionally. There have been some great teams and coaches that have never been to the Final Four, so it’s not easy. I think now that teams are so closely matched that you don’t have a dominant team anymore. You have to have players to start with and you have to coach those players, along with some luck in the draw. There are so many factors that go into making it there.”
