Of all the major sports in America, no sport loves its story and holds it as absolute as men’s college basketball.
Mike Krzyzewski can’t win big games.
Virginia’s style will never translate to success in the NCAA Tournament.
A team made up mainly of first-year students never cuts the net.
No major American sport likes to pull off a 180 or more when these narratives are torn to shreds in March than men’s college basketball.
Coach K is a modern-day John Wooden.
If they’re smart, every team will use some form of puck line defense.
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We all know what Tennessee is about when it comes to March and the stories that have yet to be overturned.
Relatively speaking, the Volunteers have a very proud college hoops tradition. They have won 15 conference championships, advanced to the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet 16 nine times, and have more career wins than programs like Virginia, Georgetown and Marquette.
From the “Fearless Five” era to the “Ernie and Bernie Show” to modern-day success under Bruce Pearl and Rick Barnes, UT fans have a lot to be excited about.
When the topic of college basketball’s biggest stage comes up, my heart stops pounding.
If you search any site for a list of “best teams in college basketball that didn’t make the Final Four” in any time period, you’ll find Tennessee at or near the top.
Not only have the Volunteers never played in the national semifinals, they have only advanced to the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament once. As a No. 6 seed in 2010, their dreams of finally breaking through on the first weekend of April were dashed in a soul-crushing 70-69 loss. michigan in the Midwest Regional Finals.
A season ago, Tennessee looked poised to make a breakthrough. Not only did the Volantes boast one of the most stifling defenses in the country, but they also boasted one of the top adjusted defensive efficiency rates of the Ken Pomeroy era dating back to the turn of the century.
What Barnes’ team lacked was an equally strong offensive force. UT’s backcourt didn’t have a pure scorer to rely on during the dry spell, but starting point guard Zakai Zeigler re-torn his ACL just before the calendar switched from February to March, making that problem a problem. has become doubly troublesome.
Despite these circumstances, the University of Tennessee earned the No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament and eliminated Duke, who had been selected to the Final Four in the second round, from the Big Dance with a resounding 65-52 victory. With the top two seeds in the East eliminated before the second weekend of the tournament, it looked like the waters for the Final Four had finally split for UT. Rather, the lack of a consistent scoring threat doomed them to last. While the Volante’s defense kept the high-powered Florida Atlantic in check for the most part, the offense had a dismal field goal percentage of 33.3 percent, missing 17 of 23 3-point shots, and the team was at half-time. They were able to turn the lead into 62 points, 27-22. Defeated at -55.
Fast forward 10 months and it would be nearly impossible to see Tennessee’s dreams crumble in the same way this round.
There are three main reasons for this.
The first is probably the most overlooked. Tennessee’s defense is almost as good as he was a year ago. The Volantes are holding opponents to 92.2 points per 100 possessions, a slight increase from last season’s 87.5 points, but still the second-highest in all of Division I.
Second, Zeigler is back fully healthy and playing the best basketball of his college career. He’s shooting better from the floor than ever before (40.4 percent), averaging a career-best 5.4 assists per game, and had an outrageous performance that matched his career-high 26 points in the road win over Kentucky. It’s showing. He had a career-best 13 assists and also had a game-high three steals. Michigan State’s Denzel Valentine was the only player in a power conference to achieve this mark in the past 11 years. He did so against Indiana on February 14, 2016, en route to earning Associated Press and NABC Player of the Year honors.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the addition of Dalton Knecht, who could be the most intriguing (and ultimately important) player of the 2023-24 season.
Knecht was not widely scouted out of high school and enrolled at Northeastern Junior College, where he grew five inches and averaged a decent grade as a freshman before scoring 20.3 points per game in his sophomore season. He left an explosive result. He parlayed that effort into an opportunity at Division I Northern Colorado, where his career followed a similar path. He averaged 8.9 points in his first season with the Bears, and a year later led the entire Big Sky in scoring with 20.2 points per game.
When Knecht chose to take advantage of the extra year of eligibility granted by the NCAA due to the coronavirus pandemic, he chose Tennessee primarily because of Barnes’ reputation as a defensive specialist. In Knecht’s mind, he already had an NBA-ready offensive game, but the bright spotlight in Knoxville plus defensive improvements would give him the total package he needed to make the transition to the league. It may be possible.
Nationally, Knecht was primarily viewed as a quality addition for Tennessee, but not a program changer. Burns had a different idea.
“Dalton is a great story of a man who was able to steadily improve his game through hard work,” Tennessee Tech’s head coach said upon signing Knecht. “He’s grown nearly a foot since he started playing high school baseball, and as he’s grown, so has his skill set. He’s a proven scorer and one of the top offensive producers in the portal.” He immediately strengthened the team’s offensive firepower.”
That turned out to be an understatement.
Knecht played in just 21 games as a Tennessee Volunteer, but ranks ninth in program history with five 30-point games and tied for fifth in program history with three 35-point games. . He has established himself as perhaps the best pure scorer in college basketball, resulting in UT going from 64th in adjusted offensive efficiency a year ago to 15th in the same category now. is increasing. In Barnes’ nine highly successful years in Knoxville, the team is on pace to become the second-highest scoring and second-most efficient offensive team.
On paper, there are no more boxes for Tennessee to check off as a national title contender. The advanced metrics and eye test are popular, and he has four wins and zero embarrassing losses in the first quadrant. No matter how you look at it, this year feels like “this year.”
But…the story.
Tennessee’s program isn’t the only one with a reputation for being insurmountable. The man currently serving as captain has been painted with the same brush for some time.
Only three active Division I coaches have more career wins to their name. When Burns arrived in 2015, he revived a Tennessee program that had won just one SEC Tournament title since 1979 and one regular-season title since 2008. Remarkably, this is the seventh consecutive year he has led the Volunteers to a win, the sixth time they have made it to the NCAA Tournament, and the third consecutive year he has led the Volunteers to at least 20 wins.
But there were struggles in March, a list Tennessee fans know by heart at this point. They lost to Loyola in 2018 and lost to Purdue in overtime in 2019, dropping to the 12th seed. oregon They lost to No. 11 seed Michigan in 2021 and had a heartbreaking loss to Florida Atlantic last season. Considering the fact that Burns’ last six teams in the NCAA Tournament have failed to make it past the opening round, and the fact that he is 1-12 overall against higher-seeded teams in the Big Dance, you can see just how strong his reputation is. right. was formed.
March is famously a Cinderella month, but that doesn’t apply to Tennessee, the SEC team on the verge of becoming the first SEC team in history to earn a No. 1 seed.
However, this team is not without its romantic underdog qualities, which will only become clear come March.
The 5-foot-9 point guard has been plagued by injuries throughout his college career.
The 69-year-old head coach is trying to avoid the legacy of “one of the greatest players to never win a title.”
The elite scoring guard, a 6-foot-1 junior college guard who has talked about playing in the NBA, now appears to be making that statement a reality.
The most successful program in college basketball history never made the Final Four.
A story is always a story until it isn’t.
