Tennessee basketball: Both Rick Barnes and Vols exorcised demons with SEC Tournament Championship

For the longest time, Rick Barnes was known as a coach who couldn’t win the big one. Tennessee basketball, meanwhile, has consistently been a program that can’t win the big one. When the two paired together in 2015, it seemed evident this would be the narrative.

On Sunday, they shut down that narrative together. By beating the Texas A&M Aggies to win the SEC Tournament Championship, Barnes accomplished something at UT that Bruce Pearl couldn’t do. Jerry Green couldn’t either despite a litany of talent.

Make no mistake, this is similar to when the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl in 2006-07. They had a general manager in Bill Polian who couldn’t win the big one with the Buffalo Bills, a head coach in Tony Dungy who couldn’t win the big one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and a quarterback in Peyton Manning with the label of not winning the big one anywhere.

Sunday was the first conference tournament title for Tennessee basketball since 1979, Don DeVoe’s first year on the job. They have won or shared four regular season SEC Championships after that, but they could never get over the hump and win the tournament.

In fact, when the league expanded to 12 teams in 1992, the Vols never even made it to the semifinals until 2008. That year, they had the No. 1 seed and won the SEC regular season outright. However, they still needed a last-second three over the South Carolina Gamecocks to make it to Saturday, and then they were upset by the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Pearl at least exorcised that demon for Tennessee basketball, but the next year, his team made it to the SEC Tournament championship game only to lose to the lower-seeded Mississippi State Bulldogs. In fact, the first eight seasons UT made the NCAA Tournament after the 1992 expansion, they lost as the higher seed in the SEC Tournament every time.

Green lost all four times as a higher seed, just as he did all four times in the NCAA Tournament, and Pearl did the same thing his first four years. Simply put, Rocky Top was a tournament choker, and everybody had given them that label.

Barnes, meanwhile, had his own bad resume. He never won a Big 12 Championship with the Texas Longhorns, nor did he win an ACC Championship with the Clemson Tigers. In all three NCAA Tournament appearances with UT, he has lost to a lower seed.

Meanwhile, he took the Vols to the SEC Tournament title game two years in a row in 2018 and 2019, only to lose to a lower seed both times. The last conference tournament title Barnes won was back in 1994, when he led the Providence Friars to the Big East title. It was also the only conference tournament title he had ever won in 34 years of coaching before Sunday.

Now, he finally has that monkey off his back, and he did it by helping Tennessee basketball get its own monkey off its back. By exorcising these demons together, the Vols and Barnes have a world of possibilities in front of them. Watch out for what they do in the NCAA Tournament.