 Hi, I'm Kelsey Rothaus and welcome to the second episode of Behind the Hype with CalTV Sports. I'm here with starting shooting guard of our CalMens basketball team currently ranked 14th in the country. Jordan Matthews, thank you so much for being here, Jordan. I really appreciate it. Happy to be here. How's your day going so far? How are you doing? It's going well. Just finished class. I'm going to go to practice after this. The usual. The usual daily grind. I like it. I like it. Now, Thanksgiving's also coming up, but you guys are going to be in Vegas for Thanksgiving. Any fun team plans, team dinner? We'll probably have a team dinner or something, but the goal is to go out there and win two games and represent the school to the best of our ability. As long as we go out there and take care of business, that'll be the fun for us. The fun Thanksgiving day. Excellent, excellent. Now, you guys obviously have so much hype around the team. CBS Sports just came out saying that Cal has the most explosive starting five in college basketball. You're a part of that. How has all of that attention affected your personal game? It hasn't affected me at all, actually. I just think that if we come to work every day, come to practice every day with our head down, looking to get better every day, then everything will fall into place. It's when you start to acknowledge the hype and read what people are saying about you is when you might fall into a couple of traps and everybody might start going in a different direction. But I think we're a very tight-knit group and Coach has us on the right path. And as long as we listen to him, we'll be fine. And with that, you were recruited by Montgomery, but you're playing for Martin. How has that changed been? How's the experience been with that? The experience has been great. I think we have the most unique coach in college basketball because he's someone who cares about you and pushes you every day. And he's willing to push you farther and farther every day, even if you don't want to be pushed because he wants you to be good, not only in basketball, but in life. That's awesome. He seems like a great coach and he has these two awesome recruits, obviously all they talk about, Ivan, Rab, and Jaylen Brown. They're great players, but they're still freshmen. They were playing in a high school gym last year. You as an upperclassman, do you feel like you've taken on a leadership role this year? I feel like that's part of my role, but I'm not someone who wants to tell them what to do because as a freshman, you kind of have to learn things on the fly. I'm wearing a game situation. I'm not going to be able to tell them what Arizona is going to run or what someone else is going to run. They have to feel it for themselves. So I think we just need to lead by example Tyrone, Sam, Jabari, myself. We need to lead by example and they're smart players. They're really good, so they'll pick up on it fast. Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's a great way to look at it. You definitely seemed like a leader at the USC football game on Halloween. You guys were acknowledged in front of the student section. You took the mic. You let a cheer for the thousands of students and you killed it. Very enthusiastic. I was there and you tried to hand it off to another player. No one would do it. Right. Would you like be a mic man if you couldn't play basketball? I would. If I didn't play basketball, I would definitely try to be a mic man. Oh, I would do it. I would definitely do it. Yeah, I'd be part of Rally-Con. Oh yeah, I'm a big Cal fan. I wasn't a huge, like I wasn't really into Cal sports when I first came to school, but the more I've been here, I'm into all sports. I want all sports to do very well. And you love calling all the chairs? I love all of them. I think you called like a give me a C, give me an A, and everyone was so into it. Yeah. That great picture. I thought you posted it everywhere. Yeah, that was all over Instagram. That was all over Instagram. Got lots of likes. Yeah. OK, now you probably were especially enthusiastic about that game against USC because your own little brother just got recruited and officially signed. He's going to be playing basketball at USC even though we got offers from Cal and other schools. How do you feel about that? How's that sibling rivalry? I'm having mixed feelings about it because I want him to come to Cal and play with me, but I'm so proud of him and happy that he's been able to carve his own path and do what he's going to do. And he's going to be able to play at a high level also. So it's the competitor side of me wants to really kill him when we play him. But the older brother aspect is just proud and happy to have him in the Paxwell with me. Excellent answer. That'll be fun. Next year, he's freshman year senior. You guys are going to face off how your parents going to handle that. They're trying to get Jersey split down the middle. Cal side and USC side. So I think they'll find a way. I love it. Well, thank you so much for being with us. Good luck the rest of the season. You guys are very fun to watch. If you haven't already checked out our first episode of Behind the Hype, take a look on Cal TV Sports YouTube channel and join us next week. After Thanksgiving, Nasser Al-Rez will be interviewing someone from the Cal dance team. Thank you again so much for being with us, Jordan. Thanks for having me. Like, I know I'm one of the best people players in this school. You know, I mean, how are you? I mean, there's average and there's good and then there's probably great. And then there's me.