SAN DIEGO—Jean Felix was tired.

He had just finished torching the Marquette Golden Eagles and he sat behind the table at Alabama's postgame press conference looking at the ground.

Surely exhaustion had set in, his chin drooping to the floor as if the effort put into each one of his 31 points left him without the energy to lift it.

He sat there letting his teammates — point guard Ronald Steele and forwards Jermareo Davidson and Richard Hendrix — do the talking.

Unfortunately for Felix, though, many of the questions were directed toward him.

Apparently that's what happens when you go off for 31 points against a good Marquette team. Apparently that's what happens when you best your scoring average by 22 points in the face of tremendous perimeter pressure.

But Felix kept it simple, deferred the glory and let his coach do the speaking.

"He got loose against the zone and made a couple of shots," said Alabama head coach Mark Gottfried. "He got off to a real good start and I thought that was the key."

Golden Eagles head coach Tom Crean thought that was the key, too, although he resented the implication that Felix's dominant day caught his team off-guard.

"That'd be an insult to the way we prepared," Crean said. "He does a great job — a great job. We didn't look at Felix as anything less than a starter on this team. He's not bashful when it comes to taking shots.

"He looked like a pro today."

And pros sometimes get tired, too.

Amoroso absent from team

Instead of traveling with the team to San Diego for the first round of the NCAA tournament, sophomore forward Ryan Amoroso returned home to Burnsville, Minn., the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

When asked about the likelihood of Amoroso returning to the Golden Eagles next season, Crean was quoted as saying, "that is probably not going to happen."