A Look Back at What Life Was Like the Last Time the Tennessee Lady Vols Weren’t in the Women’s College Basketball AP Top 25

The Tennessee Lady Vols ended a streak of 31 years being ranked in the Women’s College Basketball AP Top 25. Here’s a reminder of how long ago that was.

After 31 years, the streak is over. In the midst of a 16-11 season following an embarrassing loss to the LSU Tigers Sunday, which makes for another loss to a losing team, the Tennessee Lady Vols are out of the Top 25.

That is a milestone nobody should have wanted to see in Holly Warlick’s fourth season as a head coach. After three years of slight disappointments, the bottom has fallen out of what was once the most storied program in women’s college basketball.

The prestige of the program was built during that 31-year run, which began on Feb. 17, 1985. Eight national titles and the winningest coach in basketball history later, we take a look at what life was like before that run started.

Up to that point, Pat Summitt was barely above the 250-win mark but had no national titles and only one Final Four on her resume. Meanwhile, the dynasty and face of women’s basketball was Louisiana Tech, while UConn was on nobody’s radar. And speaking of Louisiana Tech, Tyler Summitt was not even born yet.

Meanwhile, Holly Warlick was an assistant coach at Nebraska.

But the Tennessee Lady Vols are not the only thing dramatically different from that time.

Here is a look at what life was like in other areas like the last time the Lady Vols were not ranked.

• Tennessee football was in the midst of a few streaks of its own, albeit none of them were good streaks: they had not been ranked in the Top 25 in six years, had failed to finish in the Top 25 for 10 years, and were in the midst of a 16-year SEC Championship drought. Ironically, all of those streaks would be broken later that year with the 1985 “Sugar Vols.”
• Michael Jordan was in the midst of his rookie season with the Chicago Bulls. As a matter of fact, the infamous “freeze-out” All-Star Game led by Isaiah Thomas against him had been exactly one week earlier, as Jordan’s ascension to stardom had led to jealousy from other veterans in the NBA.
• Phillip Fulmer was entering his sixth year as offensive line coach for the Tennessee Vols as a young, 34-year old coach.
• Ronald Reagan was less than a month removed from his Second Inauguration after demolishing Walter Mondale in his 1984 re-election bid, carrying every state but Minnesota and Washington, D.C.
• Speaking of politics, the most reliable state in the country for either party at the time was Vermont for the Republicans, which had voted Republican in every presidential election since 1860 except for 1964. For context on how crazy that is, Bernie Sanders has been elected twice as Senator there and served 16 years as a Congressman from that district beforehand.
• Speaking of Bernie Sanders, he was mayor of Burlington at the time, Hillary Clinton was First Lady of Arkansas while Bill Clinton was obviously governor, George W. Bush was working in the oil business in Texas, Jeb Bush was beginning his political career working in Dade County Republican politics, Marco Rubio was a 14-year old growing up in Miami, and Donald Trump was a rising young star in Manhattan touting the success of the USFL (laugh with me everybody).
• Barack Obama, meanwhile, was working at a political organization in New York as a 23-year old two years removed from obtaining his B.A. at Columbia and three years before he would enter Harvard Law School. He had never yet lived in Chicago or met Michelle Obama.
• Going back to sports, Archie Manning had just played his last season in the NFL and was six months away from announcing his retirement, with Peyton Manning eight years old going on nine at the time.
• Don DeVoe was in the midst of a very successful run for Tennessee basketball, guiding the Vols to their seventh straight postseason appearance that season.
• On the entertainment front, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” album was atop the Billboard charts three months after its release. This would be the album a set her apart from and above Cyndi Lauper. How crazy is it now to think that there was a debate at the time about who would be more successful?
• Speaking of that entertainment front, Michael Jackson was actually considered more normal than Prince at the time and was still on top of the world as his “Thriller” album was still in the process of shattering sales records three years after its release.
• The No. 1 song in the U.S. at the time was “Careless Whisper” by Wham featuring George Michael.
• Hip hop was beginning to take hold, with Run DMC, Whodini, Kurtis Blow, Too Short, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa among the major stars in the game. Dr. Dre was getting his career started, and LL Cool J would release his very successful debut album later that year.
• On the rock front, which was in its prime in terms of sales, you had Bruce Springsteen and Prince pretty much in the midst of owning everybody, with Phil Collins adding a bit to the pop-rock front.
• And most importantly, I was not even born yet, and I wouldn’t be for another three years.

So after looking at all of that, while the ending streak is sickening, disappointing, and calls into serious question just what should happen to Holly Warlick in the near future, we can at least say that this was an impressive run by the program.