By the time the media left the Gophers men's basketball locker room at Williams Arena on Saturday evening, it was all but empty. The players, toting cups of mac and cheese and sullen faces, filed out into the cold quickly and quietly.
The weight of another 0-4 start to Big Ten play — and the pressure to avoid matching last year's 0-5 start when the Gophers visit Nebraska on Tuesday — is palpable now.
"You're going to get beaten down [when you lose] because there are so many eyeballs on your program," coach Richard Pitino said. "It's the way sports work. You play like that, people are going to get on you, they're going to get on me, which they should."
But although he has preached about positivity in those moments as well-being continually "creative and innovative," Pitino is also not one to shake the board for the sake of change. As much as anything, the 33-year-old is staunchly standing by what he and the Gophers (6-10 overall) have done all year.
"There's not going to be, in my opinion, some magic trick thing that I can do to get them to all of a sudden flip the switch," Pitino said. "I think they've got to understand and trust what they're doing on the court, believe in each other and it will turn around."
Every coach has different ideas about what to do when adversity hits and players get tight. Saturday, after Northwestern crushed the Gophers 77-52, third-year Wildcats coach Chris Collins reflected on his own team's struggles a year earlier, when they were bogged in a 10-game conference losing streak. His strategy then was to shift and tweak constantly in order to keep things fresh.
"You've got to get the small victories, even if you're not getting wins," Collins said. "That's what I tried to do last year. I tried to find small ways we were improving to keep the morale up. Obviously, when you're going through it you've got to try some different things. Maybe different lineups, different practice methods. Those are just things I did, but at the end of the day there is no exact science of getting through it."
The Gophers have their own ideas. Part of that means players holding each other accountable and tuning out negativity, Pitino said.