With this being the year Tennessee basketball fans are hoping a trip to the Final Four can arrive for Rick Barnes, things quite literally could not have gone much worse for the Vols to open things up. As most of you have seen by now, the Vols shockingly lost 86-70 to Xavier in an exhibition dance. How in the world did this happen?!
Countless people are now left scratching their heads, while head man Rick Barnes understandably was not happy about how this one played out. Barnes made that perfectly clear with his postgame comments, calling out his group a bit for a lack of effort, while also noting the Vols could not have handled some adversity any worse. While it's good that this kind of performance is recorded in October instead of March, it's still a huge wake-up call for UT.
"Once we hit a little bit of adversity where they scored on us, all because of bad offense, it really got even worse because of really, really poor defense."
— GoVols247 (@GoVols247) October 16, 2026
Everything Rick Barnes said after Tennessee's exhibition loss to Xavier:https://t.co/b2sM67WeAA
"And once we hit a little bit of adversity where they scored on us, all because of bad offense, it really got even worse because of really, really poor defense," Barnes said via 247Sports. "And some of this, I'll be honest with you, you couldn't dream. I mean, you don't let somebody ever run by you to get a layup, all those kind of things. But it's good. I really, I told the guys, I said, maybe now you'll realize what we've been harping on since you guys have been here. We're going to have to learn to guard at a high rate."
Rick Barnes was not happy at all with Tennessee after a brutal loss to Xavier
No one can blame Barnes for having this kind of reaction, especially since the Vols simply could not buy a bucket when Tennessee needed to deliver. As a whole, the Vols shot 22-of-57 from the floor (38.6 percent), which is never going to cut it. To make things worse, Tennessee went 4-of-26 from behind the 3-point line.
Is that some sort of a joke? The Vols shooting 15.4 percent from downtown was brutal, and things were only made worse with high-profile transfer Juke Harris going 0-for-7. Straight up, Harris had a debut to forget, but he wasn't the only one who didn't live up to the hype on the hardwood.
VCU transfer Terrence Hill Jr. led the team with his 22 points, but that didn't matter with the rest of the squad not even coming close to being at their best. Yes, Barnes knows what it's going to take for his guys to turn things around moving forward, but it's still a bit concerning that everyone looked so flat in a game the Vols had no business losing by double digits.
Defense, defense, and more defense is going to be the main focus for the Vols in practice ahead of the regular season getting going on Nov. 3 against Wofford. If anything close to what we saw on Thursday night against Xavier arrives, though, it could turn out to be a long season for Tennessee, which would only be made worse because of such high expectations for Barnes in trying to finally get the program over the Final Four hump.
Add us as a preferred source on Google