Final Four Eludes Vols, Again…
By Mark Nagi
Let’s start by saying that two things can be accurate at the same time.
Tennessee’s men’s basketball team had another terrific season… and Tennessee’s men’s basketball team had a disappointing end to that same season.
For the Vols, this was a season with high expectations, and they met most of them, except for the biggie. They did not advance to their first Final 4 in program history.
Tennessee is arguably the best men’s college basketball program to never make it to its sport’s highest stage. They continue to get agonizingly close, playing in the Elite 8 two years in a row. But in a tournament sport like college hoops, 64 of the last 68 teams standing don’t raise a Final 4 banner.
Should that overshadow everything else that happened this season?
The Vols won 30 games for only the third time in program history while playing in the Elite 8 for only the third time. They were ranked #1 for a few weeks during the regular season. They went 10-6 against nationally ranked opponents. They lost only one game at home while beating rivals Florida and Alabama at Thompson-Boling Arena, with the win over the Crimson Tide coming on a memorable buzzer-beating 35-footer by fan-favorite Jahmai Mashack.
That home loss I mentioned came against Kentucky, a team they fell to twice. The Vols got their revenge with a 78-65 win in the Sweet 16, a game that wasn’t as close as the final score suggested. The Vols dominated the biggest game in the history of the long Tennessee/Kentucky rivalry.
But their 69-50 defeat in the Elite 8 to top-seed Houston stings so much that it’s hard to move past it right now. The Vols played very tight in the first half, shooting only 21.4% from the field, while making only 1 of their first 12 shots. Scoring 15 points in a half will not get the job done. Overall, they missed 17 of their first 18 shots from outside the 3-point arc.
Chaz Lanier scored 17 points but only made 4 of 18 field goal attempts. Zakai Zeigler scored only 5 points while turning the ball over 4 times.
To win big games, your best players must play at a high level. In the Elite 8, that didn’t happen for Tennessee.
The Vols have won 31 NCAA tournament games over the years, but an Elite 8 victory and a place in the Final 4 are rungs on the ladder they have yet to climb.
Look, I know that the Final 4 is well overdue, but I hope that Vols fans know what head coach Rick Barnes has achieved. When he arrived 10 years ago, Tennessee was an absolute mess. The Donnie Tyndall experiment was a disaster because the Dave Hart “vetting” was a joke. Since then, Tennessee has won two SEC regular-season titles and one SEC tournament title and has been consistently a postseason factor. Tennessee has now played in 7 straight NCAA tournaments, never with a seeding lower than 5th.
Would you rather be a program like South Carolina, which caught lightning in a bottle and made it to the Final 4 in 2017 but otherwise has been fairly pedestrian for 50 years? Or a program like Tennessee’s, which keeps making serious runs in the postseason?
Those are questions for every basketball fan out there.
Next year’s Tennessee basketball team will look a lot different. Can Barnes reload in this era of NIL yet again? He’ll have to if the Vols are going to have a shot to play on the final weekend of the season for the first time.
