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Indiana head coach Archie Miller and the Hoosiers take on Michigan State (6:00 p.m. ET, ESPN) in East Lansing on Saturday.

Miller and Juwan Morgan were made available to the media Friday afternoon to preview the contest.

Transcripts and video of both are available below.

Note: Video courtesy of Inside the Hall.

ARCHIE MILLER: Well, coming off of a disappointing game on Wednesday. I guess it was Wednesday against Rutgers. Evaluating where we're at right now and what we're doing, and we're trying to correct some things, but at the same time trying to reestablish that, number one, there's a lot of season left, and number two, we've got to get better in a couple areas that we can control pretty quick. Heading to Michigan State, it's going to be an amazing environment, and it's the one you want to be in, and for us we've got to try like crazy to be better in certain areas. We're obviously at the halfway point of league play, so as we start up in February and you reset your batteries for the stretch run, our goal is obviously still in front of us and what we want to do. We've got to take it one day at a time.We look at this back 10 as sort of a restart in terms of where we're at. It's a short season, a 10-game season, and it starts one game at a time, and Michigan State is up next, and we've got to be good. We've got to try to be better than we've been.

Q. Talking about what you can control, how much do you preach to these guys to maybe narrow their focus on what they can control and not get caught up and maybe overwhelmed in just trying to fix everything when you're this deep into a season with injuries and things like that?

ARCHIE MILLER: Yeah, we talked about it. We've got to hang our hat on a couple things and focus in on those, things we can control. Defensively we've got to ratchet it back up. We've got to be a better defensive team. That's step one.Number two, poise. We have to have more poise. We have shown the ability to sort of play well at times and then all of a sudden it goes away very fast, and we can't stop the flood, so to speak. And that comes down to poise and patience and don't panic on either end of the floor. Just stick with it, stay with it, and be a little smarter.I think we have to do a better job offensively right now in continuing to try to tweak and fix ourselves that we can become more efficient and get more ball movement. The ball sticks way too much at times, and that's been a big problem for us. You've just got to hang your hat on the little things, like I said. There's got to be certain things that you're taking great pride in right now, and I think, like you said, just really narrowing the focus. It's not a lot of things, it's a couple things, and we've got to do those things well.

Q. At the board of trustees meeting today, Fred said that this is a serious rebuild with IU basketball right now. When did this become a rebuild and in your eyes when did it become apparent that things needed to be rebuilt?

ARCHIE MILLER: You know, when you take over a program, you have to start with where you're at. There's got to be hopefully progress along the way each month, whenever it is along the way, whether that's your development, whether that's your recruiting, and at the end of the day, I think this team has going to be a team that needed a lot of parts and it needed a lot of chemistry this year and our depth was going to be something that we sort of hung our hat on.This team played really hard early in the season, and like it or not, our depth has been challenged in a lot of different ways. In the Big Ten you're going to need a lot of bodies. You're going to need some experience to go along with it, and we're in a stretch in the first month of the Big Ten play in terms of January where our depth and our chemistry and our team changed, okay.And that's not to say that we can't recreate ourselves here and start to do some things better, but when you take over a program, you've got to look at the big picture, and the big picture is classes upon classes upon classes and development upon development, and I think we're 18 months in and we've had one recruiting class.Obviously the depth of our older guys mixing in with that youth was a big key component, and we really haven't had the ability to put that together in terms of the role definition and whatnot. And I think hopefully here in February, you start to get a couple guys back and you can maybe recreate sort of your lineup and some things that you're trying to do, and I think that will help us, but when you take over a place, it has to start somewhere, and it's got to evolve, and we're just in that process of evolving, and you have to do it as a coach and a staff. You can't break, you can't flinch. You've got to keep sticking with it.And I think this season is long from over. We'll see obviously at the end of the season how far we can go, and then it goes into the next one and the next one and the next one.We've had good moments this season where we've shown really good progress, and like all teams, you go through sort of the waves, and we're in a wave right now, and hopefully as we continue to keep progressing here and you get to February, you want to start to play your best ball, and we have an opportunity to do that.

Q. You talked about recruiting and not about any of the guys specifically, but how difficult has it been to absorb -- your first team has got five seniors, and you talked from day one about wanting class balance and age balance on your roster. Is that something you feel like is going to take a little bit of time?

ARCHIE MILLER: I mean, it's just the natural effect of five seniors in your first year go and you bring in five freshmen, so immediately you get a little younger. That's where you need the returners that have been a part of your program in the first year to be solid, and it's kind of like I said before, you know, we just haven't had the returners to really, really stabilize this youth, sort of our younger players.As you get ready to go through the next phase, yeah, you're recruiting classes and you're going to get younger before you get older. That's just the way it's set up. You want to be able to bring in classes; you want to be able to develop them; you want them to be the backbone to what you do as you get further down the line, and getting older isn't something that happens really fast when there's sort of graduation, and from our standpoint, you looked at not only five seniors but you looked at the rising junior class last year with OG and obviously Thomas, those guys go pro, so quickly it's seven guys that go away realistically in the first 12 months.That's nothing we didn't know about on the front end, when we took over. It's nothing we're even looking at right now. The quest right now is to focus in on what we're doing as a group here, and we have a lot of room to grow here in the next couple weeks. We can get better.

Q. Just checking in on availability of Race, Devonte and Rob for Saturday?

ARCHIE MILLER: You know, our health has been something that's on going. We're looking at De'Ron as that February target of trying to get back in the mix, so I think he's going to start to really try to jump back in, so to speak, into practice. Devonte will be back, and Rob is obviously day-to-day with how he feels and whatnot, but I think he'll be fine.Zach McRoberts is the one that guy that's obviously -- just hasn't had a fair crack at it this year. It's unfortunate, just from health-wise he hasn't been able to be himself. He's dealing with a little bit of a stress reaction in his foot right now, so he's going to end up being shut down here for a time to be determined. I'm not sure on that.That's the one thing that's kind of popped up. But I think hopefully as we get into this early part of February, we have as many bodies as we've had to date, pretty much since the end of December.

Q. Michigan State not having Joshua Langford, their leading scorer, who's now going to be out for the rest of the season, how does that change their identity on both ends of the court?

ARCHIE MILLER: You know, to be honest with you, he hasn't been in there since December, so their identity is pretty good right now. They've got unbelievable depth. They've got great role distribution. They've got guys playing extremely hard, and you know, their main cogs in the wheel, so to speak, their most experienced guys are all conference players. Cassius Winston is probably as good as it gets in college basketball right now in terms of running the team. Nick Ward is about as good as it gets in terms of commanding a presence down there. With those two guys, that's a two-headed deal, but they're getting unbelievable production from a lot of different guys, Kenny Goins, Xavier Tillman are doing a great job. Obviously their presence offensively and defensively on the boards and what they're doing is a big, big reason why they're so successful, and they're playing a lot more of their younger players since Josh has been out, which adds Henry and Brown and Ahrens and those guys are in there and they're playing well. What you're seeing right now is who they are. December -- Josh I don't think has been a part of things for a good month, so what you're seeing right now, that's who they are, and they're good.

Q. You mentioned in there that Devonte will be back. Do you mean he'll be back tomorrow or he'll be back sometime? Is there a timeline?

ARCHIE MILLER: Devonte is back. He's back full go as of yesterday's practice. Barring unforeseen things, Devonte should be back in the mix for us in terms of availability to play.

Q. Al feels like a guy who's trying to step up in the way he's playing but also lead beyond his years a little bit. Where do you think he is in that process, and obviously I know it's a lot to ask of a young guy, but just how do you think he's embraced it?

ARCHIE MILLER: Al is doing a good job for us. One, he's a great teammate. He's smart, comes to work every single day. He wants to do the right thing. So that attitude right there is going to lead him as a guy that we really trust, and right now he's playing a ton of minutes, and he's doing about as well as he can do in terms of helping us have another guy out there that's communicating and understands what's going on. He shoots the ball right now as well as anybody on our team. We need him to continue to do that. He's handling the ball quite a bit for us, and he's trying to be aggressive, which is a good thing. Defensively we've just got to keep him getting better and staying with it, but Al's attitude has been great, and he's been a guy that really to be honest with you we've counted on here to give us a lot of production, and in ways he's doing a good job with it.

Q. Kind of a longer term question, but coming up on about a year since De'Ron had his achilles injury right before you guys went to Michigan State. He's kind of been able to offer you guys some stuff, but obviously his body has kind of let him down at certain points, as well. Just looking forward not only to this season but for the rest of his college career, what do you think he can maybe continue to offer you guys within your system and within the way that his body has reacted to certain things so far?

ARCHIE MILLER: Well, De'Ron's deal has really been health. When you tear an achilles, that's a serious, serious injury to come back from, and his rehabilitation from last January led him to be able to sort of go through October and November as his conditioning process.I think once he got to December, within that conditioning process, he goes through the body shock of, wow, this is hard, blah-blah-blah, and then he started to really round into form. If you watched us play, whether that be at Arkansas or Duke or in the bigger games in the non-conference, he played a role in all of those games and help us win, and that's a big part of how our team had some success. De'Ron was either -- the ability to throw the ball, the ability to make plays out of the post, a bigger body on defense at times, whether that's the Louisville game, the Butler game, he's in those games, and the ankle injury in early January against Illinois basically took him out for about a month now, and I think I've said it time and time again, if you just look back on it, De'Ron should have shut it down probably after Illinois for a two- to three-week period and maybe he would have played a bigger role here at the end of January. But it is what it is. I think he's feeling as well as he has in terms of his mobility. Now again it'll be a month of February where he has to try like crazy to stay and get more conditioning level because he really hasn't played in a month.Long-term for De'Ron, it's just -- when you're a big guy, your conditioning level and your approach to your body is the biggest thing, and he's got a number of injuries, whether it be foot or ankle or whatever, I think a lot of that will have to do with another off-season of really taking care of himself. He had to work through it, like I said. He didn't have like an off-season where he started the season a hundred percent, and he's really battled through a lot of little things across the way.But if he can be productive for us, that changes our team in a big way here down the second half of the conference play.

Q. The APR situation you inherited here, how has that been maybe something you've had to work around? How has that maybe prevented you adding guys, prevented you from doing some things with this roster you wanted to do? Has that been an issue you've had to work around at all?

ARCHIE MILLER: It hasn't really been a concern. When we got here, we had a full roster of a team; know what I mean? There wasn't a whole lot of wiggle room in terms of what we were going to do in our first year, to be able to recreate something really fast. You know, for us, development and retention is everything, and graduation is everything. You know, our goal is to put these guys in a situation where obviously they're getting better, they're getting older, and they're pursuing what they want to do academically. APR is something that I think every staff goes through when you have transfers or departures, but for us that hasn't really been a concern. We haven't navigated around it or dealt with it. We've gotten through what we've had to get through, and we'll continue to do that.But it's not one of those things that we think about every single day, and it hasn't really been a part of the makeup of what we're trying to do.

Q. Just looking at the challenges for you inside with this team, obviously Nick Ward, but depth there, too, with guys like Tillman and others, just how do you attack a team where maybe you're going to have the front line guy but then also bodies, just experienced bodies behind him in the post?

JUWAN MORGAN: I think you just have to go at it like the same way you go at any day, just like practice and things like that, just attacking each person that comes in, just because they're fresh sometimes they're not mentally ready for the game to be in there, so I think just taking advantage of that, just being in the game, being ready to go on each play, and trying to catch them off guard. I think sometimes coming into the game fresh they're over-eager to do some things, and I think taking advantage of that, trying to get them to commit some early fouls, things like that.

Q. At Rutgers you guys scored 29 points in the first 15 minutes, you scored 29 points in the last 14 minutes. In between you didn't score. You got your second foul with 6-something left in the first half, so you had to sit for a while, and you watched the start of that. Did you see anything that changed in terms of how Indiana was approaching offense or what might be able to be done differently to avoid that kind of lull?

JUWAN MORGAN: Well, I think you said it right there, just the whole demeanor change. I think we didn't become a moving team, like a passing team. We were more so moving like guys on the dribble instead of with the pass and cutting away from the ball, and I think that's just been a point of emphasis that we got away from.I think just going through practice each and every day, we've really echoed that and emphasized that, and I think guys are starting to see like how good we can be when we're moving the ball with passes instead of trying to dribble it everywhere.

Q. Archie was talking about kind of recreating some things here in the second half of the Big Ten season. What kinds of things do you think you guys can do significantly differently here in the last half?

JUWAN MORGAN: Just starting off, early on we were winning a lot of games just by being better defensively. Like we weren't really -- we're not known as knock-down shooters, we're not known for just scoring 90, 80, whatever points. We were known for getting it done on defense and really winning on that side of the ball, and we've really gotten away from that and tried to become an offensive team, instead of really letting our defense create our offense like we had been in the past.

Q. Kind of looking at the numbers from you guys in Big Ten play, seems like you can't really crack that 70-point barrier too often. What's maybe been a differentiating thing about the offense in Big Ten play compared to earlier games in the season at games like Marquette where the shots were going down and the points were going on the board?

JUWAN MORGAN: I think it's a lot of things, but I would say confidence and people's shot, I think, just like I said earlier, become a passing team. And then also just guys being ready to step up and shoot it. You know, a couple times people would be wide open and just pass it up just because they're like, oh, I'm not ready to take that shot or things like that. I tell them all the time, you put in the work to be here to take those shots, and we all trust you to take it. You've just got to shoot with confidence and knock it down.

Q. You talked about defense, that was something that really you kind of -- something you hung your hat on those first couple months in looking at games like Butler and Louisville and the way you kind of were able to take those games over with defense. What does this group have to do to get that ability back, and I know Big Ten play is a little bit different because it's a little more relentless than what you get in the non-conference, but what can this team do to get that defensive identity back?

JUWAN MORGAN: It's just attitude and effort. Anybody can play defense, it doesn't matter really how talented you are or anything like that, and that's what I try to preach to them every single day is like I always tell them, like regardless of who's in front of you, like you just have to take it as a personal challenge to try and not let them score. Of course we're not going to hold anybody to just zero points as a team for a game. We'd like to, but that's just unrealistic. But at the same time you just have to make everything as tough as possible and just everybody become that dog on defense.

Q. The last two games the team let up a 17-0 and 22-0 run. What can you do to keep that from happening in the future?

JUWAN MORGAN: Again, that's just on the defensive end, really locking down and not letting your man score. I think in those runs, teams were just comfortable. It's not like they were just -- a couple of them were live ball turnovers, but it's not like we were just throwing it to them and they were just going down and scoring. A lot of times they were just so comfortable that the net probably looked like ocean to them and they were just throwing easy chest passes, one-handed passes, things like that, and they were just comfortable, and so I think just making guys uncomfortable.

Q. How much would it help you to have De'Ron back in the mix now, just helping you defensively? You've had to guard a lot of tall guys, so having De'Ron back, how much might that help you?

JUWAN MORGAN: It will help a lot. De'Ron is a true back to the basket guy. He's not just an extra body. He's a great player. As you saw when he was healthy, the things he's able to do. He takes a lot of pressure off the front court, just being that man down there, and also that opens up things for like myself and Justin, just when people have to worry about him on the weak side, that opens up offensive rebounding opportunities for us.

Q. To kind of stay on the point to some extent, when it comes to the defense, how much is the difference just the lack of depth because basically over the course of a game when you're only playing six guys, it does get harder to kind of take that personal challenge.

JUWAN MORGAN: Yeah, I mean, it's hard, but we don't like to make excuses. Everybody is playing the same amount of games. All the best players are playing the same amount of minutes. You just really have to have that will and want-to to just step up and say, regardless of how tired I am, I just have to get this stop.

Q. Devonte Green coming back, what does he need to do to give you guys a lift to be effective?

JUWAN MORGAN: I actually talked to him yesterday. I would say that just -- being about team is not the right phrase. I would say just controlling what he can control. I would say that would be the best thing I was telling him. Just we know all the things he's capable of doing, and I was just telling him like not to try to over step those things. I was like, if you see something then do it, but also don't try to make something out of nothing. Everybody kind of knows that's what he's known, for trying to make something out of nothing, and he succeeds sometimes. But also it's just sometimes we don't need those things, and I was just trying to talk to them about that, and just really -- I think him and Rob are the best perimeter defenders we have, and I think just when those two guys -- it starts with them. Every jump ball the point guard brings it up, so just the tenacity they bring from the get-go is really what gets the rest of the team going on defense.

Q. Kind of in that vein, Coach talked about controlling what you can control and focusing on what you can control. How tough is it for a team that's obviously got a lot of youth right now, especially with some more experienced guys hurt, to just not get distracted, I guess, by everything that's going to swirling around like a seven-game losing streak, kind of the direction the season has gone and how hard can it be maybe for that group, especially those young guys, to just zero in on the one or two things that they really need to focus on most.

JUWAN MORGAN: Oh, man, it was hard. I didn't know how to go about it. I even talked to some guys before I talked to Rob, before I talked to Yogi, even Matt, just some guys that have led before and I know have been in situations where they've had to lead just because I didn't know how to attack that situation, and they were just saying things like, you just have to bring everybody together. All these guys come from winning high school programs, AAU teams, they're used to being the man, they're used to always winning, and when they did lose, it was rarely by anything more than like five points. So just really getting them to accept that like, A, everybody you play was the best on their team. So just really, if you can bring all those pieces together and just do -- find what you're best at and just continually do that on a daily basis, I think that will make us the best team possible, and just echoing that to all the younger players, and I always tell them, my freshman year we started out like 2-5, something terrible, and we ended up just -- after really coming together and bringing all the pieces that each person had and making it one unified group, that really made us the best team possible.

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