Friday in Buffalo -- a couple notes

By Colin Dunlap | 6:22 p.m. Friday

BUFFALO, N.Y.

Pretty uneventful game, to be quite honest. It was exciting for the opening 12 minutes, when Morgan State built that lead -- and then it was a downright blowout.

Some thoughts:

• An interesting comment from Da'Sean Butler when he was asked about the Big East struggling to this point in the tournament: "We're our own team. Granted we're in the same conference and we wish our conference teams well. We're a different team from everybody else. We do different things. At the end of the day we had to worry about ourselves. But they had their games. Their games were all close as opposed to -- aside from Villanova, everybody else was pretty much even teams. They were all even compared to Villanova and Robert Morris. We came in and didn't want to leave early. We wanted to take care of our business. So we did."
• For the first 12 minutes, I thought Morgan State was better than a 15-seed. By halftime it was obvious they were exactly where they should have been.
  
• Missouri's press is tremendously impressive, and might give West Virginia a ton of trouble.
  
• Along that same front, here is what Bob Huggins had to say about the potential of being pressed by the Tigers: "...we're ready to handle it. I can tell that you. We've spent a lot of time on it since the debacle in Cleveland, for a lot of reasons. Because I think there's going to be a lot of situations where we're headed at the end of the game where we're going to have to take care of the ball.
  I don't know why anybody -- I think it helps us, to be honest with you, it opens the floor. It gives us a better chance to score. We can score with the floor open. I mean, I think that's when Da'Sean has big games. I think that plays well into Devin's hands. Mazzulla's hands. And so I hope people do extend their defense a little bit and spread it out a little bit. Basically, what we've done is played against people who have stood five guys in a line."
• There are many, many, many, many West Virginia fans here. Many.
  
• As always, covering the NCAA tournament comes with a ton of glitches -- the Internet keeps imploding.
  
• West Virginia assistant coach Billy Hahn's son, Matt, is an assistant at Vermont, which is here playing Syracuse. Pretty neat story.
  
• If a team such as West Virginia or Syracuse makes a deep run to the Final Four, or goes a step farther and wins the national title, you can be certain all this talk about the conference struggling in the opening day will get very quiet.  

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