Mike Bibby is the first to fist bump and compliment a player, and he will be the first to dress them down with a critique.
Sacramento State’s first-year men’s basketball coach had a lengthy post-game conversation with the Hornets on Saturday night, and a good deal of it was blunt with this theme: Be better.
Sac State beat Division II Jessup University of Placer County 86-76 to move to 2-0 on the season in front of another full house at new Hornet Pavilion, but Bibby was not pleased. In fact, he was quite irked.
He was something of a perfectionist when he starred for the Sacramento Kings as a playmaking guard, big on fundamentals, attention to detail and effort.
With the Hornets, Bibby said he wants more ball movement and less individual play. He wants a more inspired defensive effort. The Hornets host UC Santa Barbara on Tuesday night and visit UC Davis on Friday with the chance to really kick this season into high gear.
“Very disappointed,” Bibby said after Saturday’s game. “Just paying attention to detail. The kids are making the game so hard, harder than it needs to be. This game is not hard. We work on defense every day. Then we come out here and look like we haven’t been doing anything.”
He added, “Until we stop being ‘me, me, me,’ we’re not going to be a good team.”
Despite 14 new players trying to get on the same page on the fly, Bibby sees the potential of a winning team. He said the talent is there to make history. The Hornets have a budding star in big man in Jeremiah “Bear” Cherry, a 6-foot-11, 275-pound senior transfer from UNLV who fills up the box score, including going for 15 points, 12 rebounds and five blocked shots against Jessup.
Sacramento State Hornets men’s basketball coach Mike Bibby talks to players during the season-opening game at the Hornet Pavilion on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025, in Sacramento. PAUL KITAGAKI JR. pkitagaki@sacbee.com
The Hornets have playmaking guards in Mikey Williams, Jayden Teat and Prophet Brown, each of them transfers from other Division I programs with a lot to prove. And there is 6-8 senior forward Shaqir O’Neal, Bibby’s first signing with the program and the son of the program’s general manager in Hall of Fame great Shaquille O’Neal.
Those players and those coming off the bench are expected to lead the way in this new era of Sac State basketball, a program that has produced just two winning seasons since moving up from Division II to Division I in 1991. Even in victory, of which Bibby said he does not take for granted, there are habits the coaching staff said players must break.
“The main thing is for us to slow down and stop worrying about points,” Bibby said. “Everybody’s trying to get to the next level, and even if you happen to get there, just scoring is not going to get you to that next level. We’re trying to instill this into their brains. They need to let things come to them offensively. We hold the ball too long. We want to be a running team.
“We’ll keep grinding and pushing each other. We don’t want to keep killing them (with critique), but there are a lot of little things we need to improve on. I want guys to do something else besides scoring. Until we get in that mindset of playing together, working together, it’s not going to be good. We go back to old habits.”
Bibby added, “They want to be pros. It’s not going to happen this way. You’ve got to work hard and practice hard every day. You’ve got to push through. You’ve got to be tough. We’ve got to make these kids tougher.”
Hornets players did not argue with Bibby’s general assessment. Individually and as a group, the Hornets have been challenged to be fundamentally sound, to move without the ball, to share the ball and to defend. Bibby said more practices and more games will help.
“Coach Bibb isn’t wrong in what he’s saying,” said Cherry, Sac State’s biggest player. “He’s holding us to a high standard.”
Said Williams, the sophomore guard who transferred in from UCF, “Coach is right about everything he said. We can all be better. We know we can be a good team.”
Against Jessup, Teat had 19 points, including five 3-pointers. Williams had 16 points, eight assists and six rebounds, and Prophet Johnson dropped in 16 to go with five assists.
This story was originally published November 10, 2025 at 12:01 PM.
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