Tennessee basketball: What the Sweet 16 means for Vols, Rick Barnes

Tennessee basketball is back in the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. Here’s what it means for the Volunteers and their head coach in March Madness.

As Tennessee basketball gets set to take on the Purdue Boilermakers in the Sweet 16 on Thursday, it should mean a lot of things for the Vols and Rick Barnes. Regardless of how they got there, both achieved major milestones in the process, and it means something.

For the Vols, getting to this round allowed them to match their win total of 2008, which is the highest they ever had. One more win would get them to their second Elite Eight and make this the winningest team in school history.

On top of that, it’s their sixth Sweet 16 appearance since 2000. Considering the fact that before this century, they had only made it to regional semifinals twice in school history, 1967 and 1981, that’s an amazing accomplishment. It gets more impressive, though. Before 2000, the Vols had never won more than a game in the Big Dance. They had to win two all six of these times.

Meanwhile, every four-year player that has committed to Tennessee basketball since 2003 has played on at least one Vols team to make the Sweet 16. Sure Bruce Pearl gets the bulk of the credit for making it three of these six times, but those appearances stretch through four different head coaches.

Simply put, Tennessee basketball has been a program naturally on the rise, regardless of the head coach, dating back to the Jerry Green days. Road blocks with Buzz Peterson, the unnecessary firing of Pearl, the unfair situation with Cuonzo Martin and the bad hire of Donnie Tyndall have not been able to stop that.

But what about the guy who replaced Tyndall and restored the program? Rick Barnes is a legendary coach and got fired by the Texas Longhorns because the program had been in a drought, not reaching the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament in seven years when they fired him.

Dave Hart, for all his flaws, came in and jumped on the opportunity to get Barnes. The Vols were more than happy to get a head coach that had made the NCAA Tournament in 19 of the previous 20 years and made three Elite Eight appearances and a Final Four.

Still, when Barnes was hired, the idea was that Tennessee is a lesser program, settling for an NCAA Tournament coach who won’t go far, while Texas is a big-time program looking to take the next step. Well, Shaka Smart, who replaced Barnes, is on the hot seat. Barnes, meanwhile, is back in the second round of the Big Dance.

It’s true that he did suffer a drought his final seven years at Texas. That included ending his 17-year streak of making the NCAA Tournament in 2012-2013, a year that was also his first losing season in 21 years. And the other six years, his teams got eliminated in the first or second round. As a result, he got the mark as a guy who can’t take you far when tournament time comes.

However, it was also true that Barnes made it to the second weekend three straight years and five of seven years from 2002 to 2008. Those seven seasons included his three Elite Eight appearances and one Final Four run. So it’s clear he is indeed able to go far in the tournament.

The question was if he had just lost it. Well, now back in the Sweet 16 again, that’s clearly not the case. So Barnes and Tennessee basketball enter this week with more to prove than they’ve had in a long time. But what they’ve done is already highly impressive relative to their past and issues they have recently faced.