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Tennessee basketball’s top 10 regular season wins of 2010s

By Caleb Calhoun

PHOENIX, ARIZONA - DECEMBER 09: Jordan Bowden #23 of the Tennessee Volunteers celebrates after defeating the Gonzaga Bulldogs in the game at Talking Stick Resort Arena on December 9, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Volunteers defeated the Bulldogs 76-73. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
PHOENIX, ARIZONA - DECEMBER 09: Jordan Bowden #23 of the Tennessee Volunteers celebrates after defeating the Gonzaga Bulldogs in the game at Talking Stick Resort Arena on December 9, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona. The Volunteers defeated the Bulldogs 76-73. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) /
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Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images
Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images /

Outside of the NCAA Tournament, Tennessee basketball had lots of great victories from 2010 to 2019. Here are the Volunteers’ 10 best during that time.

With five NCAA Tournament appearances, three Sweet 16s and one Elite Eight during the 2010s, Tennessee basketball obviously had lots of memorable March Madness wins. Multiple head coaches also oversaw those wins.

However, an underrated aspect of the decade is the list of memorable victories Rocky Top had during the regular season.

Of Tennessee basketball’s 27 top 25 wins throughout the decade, 26 of them came before the NCAA Tournament arrived. The same is true for 10 of their 11 top 10 wins and six of their seven top five wins.

Simply put, UT was able to secure lots of great wins throughout the decade. In this post, we’re going to rank the Vols’ best regular season wins from 2010 to 2019, which includes the 2010 portion of the 2009-2010 season and the 2019 portion of the 2019-2020 season.

Our criteria for this includes how highly ranked the teams they beat were, what each win meant to the season and whether or not they were rivalries. We will also throw a little bit of a twist into these rankings.

Since they aren’t NCAA Tournament games, SEC Tournament and regular season tournament games like the NIT Season Tip-Off will count on this list. We are counting the regular season as anything that’s not a postseason NIT or NCAA Tournament game.

It may be unfair, but memorable games in those moments need to count at some point, and there aren’t to many of them. We will weight them, though, in terms of what they meant as a tournament game.

Even with that, the Vols still had plenty of memorable moments throughout the decade that didn’t come in any tournament. So let’s go ahead and break down exactly when they were and who they were against. These are Tennessee basketball’s top 10 wins from 2010 to 2019.

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