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Tennessee basketball: Scenarios for Vols to win SEC regular season title

By Caleb Calhoun

ST LOUIS, MO - MARCH 10: Rick Barnes the head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers gives instructions to his team against the Arkansas Razorbacks during the semifinals of the 2018 SEC Basketball Tournament at Scottrade Center on March 10, 2018 in St Louis, Missouri. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
ST LOUIS, MO - MARCH 10: Rick Barnes the head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers gives instructions to his team against the Arkansas Razorbacks during the semifinals of the 2018 SEC Basketball Tournament at Scottrade Center on March 10, 2018 in St Louis, Missouri. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images) /
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Tennessee basketball’s losses to the LSU Tigers and Kentucky Wildcats have complicated the Volunteers’ road to the Southeastern Conference championship.

Well, after losses to the Kentucky Wildcats and LSU Tigers, Tennessee basketball has gone from sole possession in first place in the SEC standings to being tied with those two teams. If the SEC season ended today, the head to head tiebreakers would have them as a No. 3 seed.

However, the Vols are lucky enough to have four games left in the SEC season. As a result, even if they have lost a No. 1 seed position in the NCAA Tournament, Rick Barnes’s team has plenty of chances to get things right. They don’t control their own destiny to win the title outright or get the top seed, but they have plenty of ways to get some help.

One of those chances to help themselves includes another game at Kentucky. But it also includes two road games against very good teams in the Ole Miss Rebels and Auburn Tigers along with a tough home game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs.

You could feasibly see UT losing three of its final four games and not be surprised, which would be a huge disappointment for a team that started the year 11-0 and spent multiple weeks at No. 1. However, at 24-3 and 12-2 overall, they are not out of anything just yet.

In fact, the outright regular season SEC Championship is still in play. That’s obviously the goal of this team, and there are multiple ways for them to get there. Beating LSU on the road last Saturday would have made things significantly easier, but it’s not over yet.

There’s no reason to believe UT can’t finish on top of the league standings, and in this post, we’re going to look at all the ways that possibly can happen. Our scenarios determine how the Vols can win the SEC regular season title outright depending on how they finish the year.

The regular season title should always be a bigger goal than the conference tournament title since the latter one is just about getting hot. And if they want a top seed in the NCAA Tournament, the Vols need to win one of those two.

So let’s see how they can do that with the regular season title. We’ve got four plausible scenarios in which UT can win it out right and then a fifth page of unlikely to impossible scenarios. Here are all the ways Tennessee basketball could win the SEC regular season championship outright.

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