I call it like I see it. Vols missed a great opportunity to go far in the tournament. It can't align better than that. Kind of like B.Jones in the SECE. Is Calipari gonna blow his gift seeding? We hope so.
Yes, but I have a warm fuzzy feeling that Barnes will have plenty more chances in the future. Barnes is most definitely not Butch Jones. Barnes routinely made the Tourney in a P5 conference and had one Final Four appearance, which is basically like making the playoffs in football, right?
Butch Jones had a couple conference titles in the AAFC (or whatever the hell the old Big Least is called), and even then lost two games in his best season.
I am not one of those people who say Butch Jones was a terrible coach, but he was at his best, above average.
Barnes is a good to excellent coach based on his Texas record. Odds are we compete for the SEC again next year, have a great shot of winning it again, and most likely get a fairly high NCAA seed again.
Anything can happen, but I am confident about the future of the men's program. My main concern is how long Barnes will continue to enjoy what he's doing. He is definitely getting to retirement age.
Final thought...it also matters HOW we missed the opportunity. On paper we had two big advantages against Loyola...rebounding and shot blocking. Their advantage against us was shot percentage. Alexander is critical to our shot blocking and rebounding, so there went our two big advantages. If you paid attention to the game, Loyola was hitting from outside early, so we got on them. They then went inside and scored quite a bit from the paint, so we had to sag back in and that then opened up the perimeter again.
With Alexander in the paint, I doubt they score as many inside points.
And again, that bounce was ridiculous.
This wasn't a game we led by 13 in the 4th quarter and found a way to lose, or that we gave up a miracle hail mary on (see two of our last three games in football
).
This was a game in which one of our key players was out AND they got a really lucky bounce on the last shot.
Worlds different than some of those games Butch Jones blew. No comparison.