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Tennessee basketball: 5 disadvantages Vols face in the SEC Tournament

By Caleb Calhoun

DALLAS, TX - MARCH 17: Jordan Bowden #23 of the Tennessee Volunteers reacts after losing to the Loyola Ramblers 63-62 in the second round of the 2018 NCAA Tournament at the American Airlines Center on March 17, 2018 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
DALLAS, TX - MARCH 17: Jordan Bowden #23 of the Tennessee Volunteers reacts after losing to the Loyola Ramblers 63-62 in the second round of the 2018 NCAA Tournament at the American Airlines Center on March 17, 2018 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images
Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images /

5. Not winning the SEC regular season title could hurt Tennessee’s morale. 

Think about this if you’re Tennessee basketball. You enter the year as the most experienced team in the SEC and make it all the way to 23-1 and 11-0 in the conference. Part of that run was a record amount of time the program and Rick Barnes spent at No. 1.

The Vols also managed to beat the No. 1 ranked team in the nation during that time in what was basically a road game, and it was their fifth win over a No. 1 team in history and the first for Barnes. Simply put, they are riding high in every way possible.

But after all that, a stumbling finish to the season caused your team not to win even a share of the SEC regular season championship. Once being all but guaranteed to secure a No. 1 seed, they are now firmly a No. 2 seed. That is very disheartening, and entering the postseason ranked lower than they have been all year only makes it worse.

So Barnes’s team has to regroup. They are a veteran bunch, meaning if anybody can do it, it’s them. But entering the SEC Tournament feeling so deflated by knowing they didn’t win anything after all they accomplished can be a psychological killer.

A bit of good news is that UT didn’t really disappoint in their final stretch of games. Their schedule just got more difficult. What shocked everybody was the fact that the LSU Tigers would not lose, and that’s what cost the Vols the SEC. This team didn’t fail expectations, though.

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