Tennessee basketball wasn’t ‘the last team standing’ but hardly a failure

Assistant Sports Editor

In college basketball, only four postseason tournaments exist after the conference championships: the prestigious NCAA Tournament, the NIT, the CIT and the CBI. The harsh truth is that outside of the four teams that win, the remaining 354 college basketball teams end their season with a loss.

In college football, 82 teams make bowl season. So, with the addition of the playoff, 40 teams end their season with a postseason win, and it’s usually the better team. However, college basketball isn’t so predictable, and the hotter team generally wins each matchup.

Every program in the nation wants to end victoriously, but very few actually do. The Vols were one of the teams to fall short, losing to Florida Atlantic in the Sweet 16.

“The fact is it’s always disappointing when you know you’re close to going after the goal that I think we all chase, and that’s to be the last team standing,” head coach Rick Barnes said.

So, how do you gauge a season that doesn’t end in a win? What is success? What is failure?

For Tennessee, this season was shaping up to be one of Rick Barnes’ finest coaching jobs at the end of January. His squad moved to 18-3 and a No. 2 ranking after pulling off a dominant win over a Texas team on Jan. 29 that nearly booked a trip to the Final Four this past week- end.

They had lucked out for most of the season and hadn’t dealt with any serious injuries outside of a Josiah-Jordan James offseason knee surgery and a Santiago Vescovi shoulder injury in December.

After Tennessee fell at Florida but bounced back in a 46-43 cage match against Auburn, the injury bug finally caught up to the Vols.

James went down in Nashville with an ankle sprain in a buzzer-beating loss to Vanderbilt, and Julian Phillips left early in a second straight loss at the buzzer to Missouri. Just like that, Tennessee was down two starters in the most important stretch of the regular season. Both were averaging nearly 10 points and five rebounds per game at the time.

Still, they were both back by a Feb. 28 matchup with Arkansas as point guard Zakai Zeigler and Santiago Vescovi were playing their best basketball of the season.

However, the Vols were about to be dealt their most devastating blow of the season as Zeigler went down with a season-ending ACLtear. Not only was Zeigler the starting point guard and facilitator of the offense, but he was the heart and soul of the team — a leader. The team seemed to go as he went.

Without Zeigler, the Vols were a completely different team, and they had little time to figure out life without him with just one game remaining before the conference tournament.

“I mean we’ve dealt with a lot of adversity this month,” Barnes said after Zeigler went down. “We thought we were getting rolling and things came up. Because of that, last game and the game before this team has shown a lot of resiliency.“Again, we all hurt for Zakai.”

Resiliency was a word Barnes used every game once the injuries piled on. And the fight showed each game. Tennessee squeaked by Louisiana and rallied to defeat a very good Duke team to reach the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament.

Without Zeigler, the Vols weren’t expected to make it out of the first weekend, and yet they did. They overcame a lot of adversity and never seemed to give up.

The team suffered a season’s worth of adversity — if not more — over the course of a month. Sure, a Final Four appearance or better would have been one of the best stories in recent history, but a Sweet 16 appearance is hardly a failure.

“I just want people to know that we played our hearts out every night,” James said. “We tried to come out on the court and play our brand of basketball. Regardless of what was going on with the team, who was in, who was out, what games we had coming up, we stuck together.”