Tennessee basketball sure made it a fun winter
March is full of emotional contradiction when it comes to college basketball. Heart-stopping. Magical. Stressful. Euphoric. Emotional. And then, for all but one team, disappointing to the point of even being soul-crushing.
When you are rolling in tournament play, especially the NCAA Tournament, there is absolutely nothing better.
And then, abruptly, the ride ends. There is almost a cruelty to it. Especially when you have a team that is capable of winning it all.
Tennessee was capable of cutting down the nets in Phoenix on April 8. Rick Barnes acknowledged as much to me earlier this year. And the veteran coach knows that you don’t always have a team capable of winning it all.
But that won’t happen because the Vols came up short against Purdue. It was a tough 1 versus 2 matchup in a region, the most Final Foul-caliber game of the Elite Eight. The Boilermakers should (at least) play for the National Championship thanks largely to the biggest advantage in college basketball, Zach Edey.
It’s a painful loss, and while the loss hurt, what hurts more is the fact that you won’t get to see this edition of the Vols play again. And while Sunday was a missed opportunity, what a ride the last five months have been. This group has been fun to watch from October until today.
They have won in a variety of ways. They have won in grind-it-out games, in shootouts and every way in between. And they did it led by a generational player in Dalton Knecht. Everyone will remember his performance at Georgia, against Florida, against Auburn, and, of course, Sunday afternoon on the game’s biggest stage. He will go down in Vol hoops history as the greatest one-year player to ever wear the orange.
I sure hope I get to watch the guy better than Knecht, because the Northern Colorado transfer was like no Vol of the 21st century.
Knecht finished his Vol career second all-time in single season scoring. His 37 points against Purdue in defeat set a school record for single game NCAA Tournament points. His 102 points in four NCAA Tournament games are a school record for a single tournament.
For perspective the Tennessee career NCAA Tournament record is 136 by Wayne Chism in ELEVEN tournament games.
In just five months of work, Knecht made himself one of the best ever to wear the orange and white. His team will go down in history as one of the best ever.
27 wins. Outright SEC regular season champions for only the second time since 1967. A win at Rupp. The SEC Player of the Year who is also a unanimous All-America selection. The school’s second-ever trip to the Elite Eight.
More than all of that, this bunch was just so much fun to watch and so much fun to follow.
Tennessee was good enough to win it all. They were good enough to play on Monday night. To have a chance to do that, they had to be great on Sunday. Knecht was. His supporting cast couldn’t offer enough support.
And so it is over. Abruptly. Soul-crushingly.
Judgement of a team in March is often confounding. March fully defines the team that wins it all, and usually of the other three teams that make the Final Four. It also defines the teams that get bounced early like Purdue did a year ago and Kentucky has the last two years.
So how do you define this Tennessee team?
To me, it’s simple. They are the most accomplished team in Tennessee history who, with a little-known, (at the time) transfer from Colorado took everyone in orange on one heck of a ride.
Would you have taken this season—all of it—if I told you on October 1 that this was the ride that you would get?
Yep.
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