Who's Northwestern's best shooter? Chris Collins says he is

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"The best shooter on the team right now, you included, is who?"

Dan Patrick set Northwestern head coach Chris Collins up for a little self-promotion during an interview Monday on "The Dan Patrick Show," and Collins took full opportunity.

"Me," he said.

The head coach of the tournament-bound Wildcats was not too long ago a sharpshooter at Duke. And though he admitted to not being able to play much anymore, Collins fully recognized that he's still got the shooting touch, a better one in fact than any of his current players.

"Look, I have a thing in my family, and my kids and my wife get really mad. I always tell them when we compete at home, whoever gets second place in the board game or the competition or the video game actually wins because I always win.

"I always mess with the guys. I never had great foot speed so I can't really play anymore anyway, but I can still outshoot them. Hopefully there'll be a day when some guys on the team can outshoot me. That would mean that we're a pretty good team."

He's got the numbers to back it up, too. During his senior season with the Blue Devils, Collins shot 46.7 percent from the field and 44.1 percent from 3-point range. He'd rank in the top 10 in the Big Ten in 3-point percentage this season.

Patrick focused a great deal on Collins' history at Duke — he did spend four years there as a player and 13 more as an assistant coach — and at one point jabbed him for his lack of defensive intensity as a player.

"How do you teach defense, for somebody who didn't play defense?" Patrick asked, getting some laughter out of Collins.

"That's a good question, I get that often," Collins responded. "I never got in a stance much when I played. My viewpoint of defense was outscoring my man. I felt if I outscored my man, then I played good defense. But it's something that we've had to hang our hat on as we've built our program because quite frankly we hadn't had the firepower, especially in our conference, to match up with the likes of the Wisconsins and Indianas and Michigan States and so on and so forth. So we had to become a hard-nosed defensive team to be able to be competitive. I think it's become part of our identity. Like you said, the people who know me best can't believe we're like a defensive-minded team. But I'm going to keep fooling them while I can."

Whatever he's doing is working for Northwestern. The Cats rank second in the league in scoring defense, holding opponents to 64.9 points a game, and second in field-goal percentage defense, limiting opponents to 39.8-percent shooting.

Check out the full interview below:

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