Tennessee basketball: Ranking all four Vols coaches by performance in 2010s decade
For the record, Rick Barnes’ record this decade will change, as he has one more game to play against the Wisconsin Badgers in 2019. Anyway, he is already the most successful UT men’s basketball coach on here.
Again, Bruce Pearl so far is probably a greater Tennessee basketball coach than Rick Barnes, although that can change. And in this decade alone, Barnes has done a much better job than Pearl, rebuilding a program from the ground up that had turned into a mess in part because of mistakes Pearl made early on in the decade.
When Barnes was hired to replace Donnie Tyndall, the program was on fire. Tyndall, after Pearl, made for two coaches this decade fired due to NCAA infractions, and he was gone after a year. So Barnes took over a depleted roster with no elite recruiting class, and the program was too toxic for him to recruit top-notch talent.
Being fired by the Texas Longhorns hurt his brand in recruiting as well. So Barnes set out to find three-star guys he could develop. He had Admiral Schofield, Kyle Alexander and Lamonte Turner in 2015 and then signed Grant Williams, Jordan Bone and Jordan Bowden in 2016. All of these players were three-stars.
After a losing season in 2015-2016 and then a .500 year in 2016-2017 with all of those young guys, the developmental project finally took off in 2017-2018. Barnes led the Vols to a share of the SEC Tournament title that year and the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
It only got better in 2018-2019. The Vols achieved only their second No. 1 ranking and 30-win regular season in school history, and they made the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament. This was all with three-star talent.
Barnes is able to get top-notch talent again now, but it’s because of the national program he built. While he didn’t reach an Elite Eight like Pearl, he clearly accomplished enough other things to be the best Tennessee basketball head coach of the 2010s.
For more of our posts recapping the Tennessee Vols during the 2010s decade, please click here. If you want to just look at men’s basketball stories recapping the Vols from this decade, you can click here.