Tennessee basketball: Vols top 10 modern-era teams with under 20 wins

3. 1988-1989

19-11 (11-7)

NCAA Tournament

We talked about the first slide on this list being somewhat of a rebound year for Don DeVoe just to get back to the NIT. Well, he built upon that for this year, finally doing something that he hadn’t done in six years, since Dale Ellis left. That was getting back to the NCAA Tournament. And it seemed to revitalize Tennessee basketball at the time.

All five starters were back from that team, including three future NBA players in Dyron Nix, Doug Roth and Ian Lockhart. Nix was the star, and Greg Bell, Clarence Swearengen and Mark Griffin were all key parts of the rotation as well. With so much experience, UT jumped out to an 11-1 start, reaching the top 20 in November and staying there until January.

However, at 12-2 and 4-0 in the SEC, things fell apart, as the Vols lost four straight games. That knocked them out of the rankings. Still, in a down SEC year, they managed to stay above water and got into the SEC Tournament with an 18-9 record. Winning one game in the tournament got them to 19-10, and that allowed them to get back to the NCAA Tournament.

In the tournament, the Vols lost to the West Virginia Mountaineers in the first round. That loss resulted in unfair pressure mounting against DeVoe, so he resigned, and UT would not make it back to the Big Dance until 1998. So not only is this one of the best seasons ever for a team that failed to win 20 games, fans would be pining to go back to this season in the mid-1990s.