Tennessee basketball: 5 disadvantages Vols face in the SEC Tournament

2. Rick Barnes struggles in conference tournaments.

Let’s be clear here. Rick Barnes is a great coach. He has a history of making the NCAA Tournament, producing ranked teams, making a run in the tournament and finishing high in conference standings. He has won everywhere he’s been.

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But Barnes’s history in conference tournaments is not a good one. This is his 32nd year coaching, and it will be his 32nd conference tournament. He has won one in his entire history, and that was in 1994 with the Providence Friars.

He never won one with the Clemson Tigers, and despite three Big 12 regular season championships and a Final Four appearance, he never won one with the Texas Longhorns either. By the way, he definitely has had the team to do it. Bill Self and Roy Williams owned Barnes when it came to dominating the Big 12.

This is part of Barnes’s nature, though, as an overall coach in postseason games. It’s safe to say he has struggled in recent years in tournaments altogether. Remember, he hasn’t been past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2008.

So can Barnes overcome himself in the SEC Tournament? It’s not like he has a history of succeeding on this stage, and the only conference tournament he won was 25 years ago. That doesn’t bode well.

The good news here is that Barnes also never beat a No. 1 team until this year and had never spent two weeks at No. 1 until this year either. So he has a different team altogether than any one he’s coached, and it’s a team built for postseason play. So maybe it’ll finally change.