Tennessee basketball: Ranking all 6 Vols losses of 2018-2019 by heartbreak

Tennessee basketball came so close to a historically great season in 2018-2019. Here is a ranking of all six Volunteers losses by heartbreak.

It was a bittersweet season for Tennessee basketball. Matching their all-time total of 31 wins, beating the No. 1 team in the nation and reaching No. 1 themselves for just the second time in school history were certainly things to celebrate.

However, winning no SEC regular season or tournament championship and coming up short in the Sweet 16 to finish 31-6 were all drawbacks for Rick Barnes’s team. Even spending four weeks at No. 1 can’t nullify that, especially when the last No. 1 ranked Vols team at least won the SEC regular season championship.

The crazy part is Tennessee basketball was maybe one win away from being the most accomplished in school history, and two would have definitely put them there. But which of those two would they like back the most?

Well, we can look at them all. In this post, we’re going to rank the Vols’ six losses by level of heartbreak, and that comes down to many things. Just know that this will be a very painful experience for Vol Nation.

Anyway, heartbreak is not just about how close the loss was. It’s about the magnitude of the loss and what it meant. We’re going to factor both of those things into our rankings here, and the results may surprise some people.

What’s clear is every single one of these losses directly resulted in the Vols not being able to hang a banner this year. The banner itself though varies depending on the game, and some are more important than others.

Taking all that into account, let’s go ahead and examine all the bad ways the season went down. This is our ranking of all six losses from the 2018-2019 Tennessee basketball season by their level of heartbreak.