Terrific Tennessee Tuesday: Rick Barnes
Something to consider as Tennessee tries to right the ship in SEC play under their future Hall Of Fame head coach.
I completely understand Tennessee men’s basketball fans who are very frustrated with head men’s basketball coach Rick Barnes’ eleventh team in Knoxville right now. The victory over No. 7 Houston, the Cougars’ only loss this season as of this writing, feels like a lifetime ago. The Vols are 2-5 in big-time match-ups since that victory over Kelvin Sampson’s team, which includes losses to Syracuse, Kansas, No. 13 Illinois, No. 17 Arkansas, and No. 19 Florida. On the other side of the coin, it was also less than a month ago that Tennessee beat the brakes off a top-20 Louisville team inside the Food City Center.
But again. I get it.
There are many reasons that this is the case. The biggest being that so many other true freshmen five-star players are having unprecedented, spectacular seasons for their schools. Just take a gander at 247sports’ top-5 recruits in the 2025 class and try not to wince a little bit.
Tennessee’s talented five-star true freshman Nate Ament, though, is having a Just Fine start to the season. For Tennessee to have any chance at reaching the Elite Eight for the third consecutive season, Ament is going to come on in a hurry for the Vols. To be fair to Ament, that can still very much happen as he has the talent, but we’re now in conference play, and that potential leap for the uber-talented wing needs to become a reality sooner rather than later. ESPN’s Joe Lunardi’s latest Bracketology update has Tennessee as a 6-seed if the NCAA Men’s Tournament were to begin today. If that is in fact where the Vols are seeded in the Big Dance come March, it’d be the lowest-seeded Tennessee NCAA Tournament team Barnes has had. The next highest was that 2020-21 Tennessee team, which was a 5-seed and got upset by Oregon State in the first round.
I understand the angst amongst this fanbase right now about this team.
I do.
However, I also view the collective angst as a ringing endorsement of the Rick Barnes era at Tennessee. We’re frustrated because this team has gone to the Elite Eight in back-to-back years. We were spoiled with four years of an all-time great Vol in Zakai Zeigler. We found one of the biggest transfer portal gems of this era in Dalton Knecht. Barnes has won at least 27 games in three of the last four seasons. If the Vols didn’t run into one of the two best remaining teams in the Elite Eight in 2024, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assume Tennessee makes the Final Four that season with Knecht. Quite simply, Barnes has had this program humming at an elite level for half a decade now, and it’s easy to forget that and to forget just how hard it is to sustain that.
It’s perfectly fine if this year’s team doesn’t have what the last four teams have had. The team that followed Barnes’ elite 2018-19 ball club, led by Grant Williams and Admiral Schofield, never got above No. 17 in the AP Poll and finished 17-14. The following season, Tennessee reached as high as No. 6 in the AP Poll. For the next four seasons, Barnes led Tennessee to rankings as high as No. 5, No. 2, No. 4, and No. 1, respectively.
So things have been good. Well, that’s not really true. Things have been great under Barnes, particularly these last four years. It was always going to be a challenge to replace longtime leaders like Zeigler and Jahmai Mashack, along with going all-in on a true freshman wing like Ament rather than older, budding stars out of the transfer portal like a Knecht or Chaz Lanier. There is still a lot to like about this team, whether it’s Ja’Kobi Gillespie’s preposterous accuracy on thirty-footers or DeWayne Brown’s endless motor or the emergence of Amari Evans. Sophomore guard Bishop Boswell needed to take a step this season, and he’s taken a much bigger one that I suspect a lot of folks might have predicted before the season, particularly shooting the basketball with his 57 percent from deep percentage three games into SEC play. He’s a fantastic story, easily my favorite of the season thus far.
So I’m not going to pretend to have any idea how the rest of the season unfolds for Barnes’ team. I do know that the angst about it is a good thing, though, and something that is to be appreciated simply because of all the success Barnes has had for so many years now. We’re frustrated not just because we care but because it has been a long time since things have been this frustrating. That’s a blessing in and of itself, I think, and why, regardless of how the rest of the 2025-26 season plays out for Barnes, he’s more than earned a bit of a step-back season in Knoxville.