No program has more NCAA Tournament wins without a trip to the Final Four than Tennessee. Michigan made sure to keep that trivia fact intact on Sunday, dismantling the Volunteers 95-62 in the Midwest Regional Final in Chicago. Dusty May’s Wolverines also made sure that questions about Rick Barnes’s ability to get over the hump will linger for another year, extending his Final Four drought to 22 years.
Barnes has largely quieted talk about his struggles in March with three-straight trips to the Elite Eight, but after he confirmed that he’s coming back to Tennessee for another year, it’s impossible not to ask what changes he needs to make to finally smash through the Elite Eight ceiling that he and his program have continually bumped their heads on. It’s also hard not to see the obvious answer.
Rick Barnes needs to add more offense
For a 71-year-old, Rick Barnes is up with the trends, at least in college basketball roster construction. Last season’s national title for Todd Golden’s Gators has helped to spread the movement to supersize. Rather than be subject to the volatile winds of three-point shooting, the top programs have upset-proofed their teams, raising the offensive floor with massive lineups focused on rim dominance and offensive rebounds.
While Tennessee wasn’t the best team using this model, they may have leaned into it more than any other. With three players taller than 6-foot-10 in its starting lineup, the Vols led the country with a 45.1 percent offensive rebound rate, and nine of their shots were putbacks. Unfortunately, Dusty May has also embraced the sport’s new ethos and is doing it as well as anyone.
While Tennessee could rely on a 45 percent offensive rebound rate to carry it against Miami (OH), Iowa State, and even a Virginia team with great positional size, against Michigan’s three-big lineup, it was helpless to create other offense. Even with 19 offensive rebounds, Tennessee shot 32 percent from the field and 19 percent from three.
Two years ago, Barnes’s Vols paired a dominant defense with a heliocentric offense that went as far as Dalton Knecht could take it. He took it to the Elite Eight before he ran into Zach Edey and Purdue. Last year, Barnes envisioned something similar for Chaz Lanier, another senior transfer sharpshooter, but also relied heavily on Zakai Zeigler’s playmaking. Again, they reached the Elite Eight and were hopeless to score in a 65-50 loss to Houston.
This time around, he went the veteran route to replace Zeigler with senior transfer Ja’Kobi Gillespie and found his wing creation in five-star freshman Nate Ament. In the loss to Michigan, the duo went a combined 10-34.
Michigan just made Rick Barnes’s Transfer Portal plans clear
It’s not just that Barnes is exiting the dance floor at the same time each year; it’s that he’s forced to leave for the same reason. He can’t abandon his principles of defense and rebounding, because they set an incredibly high floor for his program, but he has to go even further than pairing Gillespie with Ament. He needs multiple players who can get their own shot off the dribble because things bog down late in the NCAA Tournament, and if you’re predictable to gameplan for, you have almost no shot.
The Transfer Portal opens on Tuesday, April 7, and without a blue-chip McDonald’s All-American like Ament in the recruiting class, Barnes will need a serious haul of offensive talent to raise the ceiling in March, even if he risks sacrificing the defensive floor.