Tennessee basketball’s 1999-2000 team reunites on Zoom

The 1999-2000 Southeastern Conference Championship and Sweet Sixteen Volunteers reunited with Tennessee basketball head coach Rick Barnes hosting.

Before the arrival of Bruce Pearl, no men’s Tennessee basketball team had been more successful than the 1999-2000 Vols. Led by third-year head coach Jerry Green, this team won what was then a school-record 26 games, capturing a share of the SEC regular season championship and advanced to the Sweet Sixteen.

On Sunday, current UT head coach Rick Barnes had that group reunite to celebrate the 20th anniversary of that season. Barnes set up the zoom call and brought on some legends from that era, including Ron Slay, Vincent Yarbrough Tony Harris, Isiah Victor, Jenis Grindstaff, Vegas Davis, Del Baker, Terrence Woods, Del Baker and Zach Turner.

Together, they talked about that year while Barnes talked about a time he went against UNC Asheville while Green was an assistant there. They then appeared confident that they could beat the 2018-2019 Tennessee basketball team. Here’s the full video.

Honestly, the part about that team and Barnes’ best team on Rocky Top facing off had some accurate analysis. As Woods implied, Barnes as head coach of the 1999-2000 team may have produced even greater results, and Slay is right to point out that their team would have won in the tunnel. Those guys were fighters and had a tough mentality.

Remember, during that year, Slay was a freshman with another elite big man named Marcus Haislip. Charles Hathaway and C.J. Black were also on the team. Those guys and Victor made for a dominant inside game. Harris was the glue guy as the junior point guard and the second leading scorer, and Yarbrough was the leading scorer and all around best player. That team was loaded.

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In the second round of the NCAA Tournament, these guys bounced out the defending national champion UConn Huskies. However, this is also a season looked at as what could have been. After that UConn win, this team blew a nine-point lead to the North Carolina Tar Heels in a rare game where UNC was the one to pull off the upset as a No. 8 seed.

Had Tennessee basketball won that game, they would have faced the No. 7 seed Tulsa Golden Hurricane in the Elite Eight. UT was a No. 4 seed, and the top three seeds in their bracket were eliminated before the Sweet Sixteen, including the No. 1 seed Stanford Cardinal. Simply put, the Vols easily could have made their first Final Four that year.

Now, to be fair, Tulsa was led by Bill Self and beat them by 20 in a December matchup. However, that was before Slay, Woods, Haislip and Jon Higgins, all elite freshmen in that class, had really gotten the chance to develop. When they did, this team roared through the SEC.

Also, if UT had reached the Final Four, they would have faced the Florida Gators, a team they swept in the regular season. So if not for blowing that lead to an inferior UNC team, they easily could have faced the Michigan State Spartans in the national title game.

Instead, they lost in the first round and collapsed down the stretch of the following season despite everybody returning. As a result, Green resigned, forever altering the future of Tennessee basketball. However, this team went 26-7 and does remain one of the greatest in school history.