Tennessee basketball: March Madness upset doesn’t derail Vols’ successful season

Okay, so they lost to a lower seed in their fourth straight March Madness appearance. It’s the second time they lost as a No. 3 seed to a No. 11 seed. However, solely focusing on the early exit by Tennessee basketball from the NCAA Tournament ignores all the successes they had.

Rick Barnes led the Vols to their first SEC Tournament Championship in 43 years. They won the season series against the Kentucky Wildcats. There were top five wins over UK, the Auburn Tigers and the Arizona Wildcats. Oh, they also beat a blue blood in the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Finally, Tennessee basketball finished the season with a 27-8 record, the fourth most wins in school history. The other three schools included their only two teams to ever reach No. 1 and win 30-plus games in school history and their only team to reach the Elite Eight.

NCAA Tournament success is a factor when judging seasons, don’t get me wrong. However, championships, wins over rivals and quality victories also count. If Vol fans only judge success in March by how their seasons went, well, then they hardly had any successful seasons.

In fact, going by that success alone would still mean only eight seasons were better than this one, as only eight times did they reach the final 16 in the Big Dance. It’s only happened six times since the tournament expanded to 64 teams. Is that really a fair standard to judge everything by?

For context, Bruce Pearl took Rocky Top to its only Elite Eight in 2010. However, any educated fan would say his best year came in 2008, when the Vols won the regular season SEC Championship, won a school-record 31 games and reached their first No. 1 ranking in history.

Critics will point out that this year was bad because it was a waste of talent given the combination of experience with guys like John Fulkerson and Josiah-Jordan James and five-star talent in Kennedy Chandler. That also ignores history, though.

The Ernie and Bernie show with Bernard King and Ernie Grunfeld is the most beloved era in Tennessee basketball history. Those teams were coached by Ray Mears, the most beloved head coach in the program’s history. Both teams from that era to make the NCAA Tournament lost their first game, in 1976 and 1977.

Would you question the talent on those teams?  King became an NBA superstar, Grunfeld became a 10-year NBA player. Terry Crosby, also on both teams, made the pros. Reggie Johnson was on the second team, making for four NBA players.

Should we ignore the success of those two teams, including their regular season SEC Championship in 1977, Mears’ final year, just because of their failures in the NCAA Tournament? Of course we shouldn’t. It’s not a fair way to look at the whole season.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still concerns with Tennessee basketball losing to lower seeds every year in the NCAA Tournament under Barnes. His lack of adjustments should be criticized, and it’s a huge weakness. However, in a macro sense, this was a successful year, even if it had a disappointing quick exit.