KNOXVILLE — JaJuan Smith slumped his weary body into a chair inside the University of Tennessee’s media room inside Thompson-Boling Arena late Sunday afternoon.
Out on the court, orange and white confetti covered the floor where the Vols had just won their first outright Southeastern Conference regular-season basketball title since 1967. To put that into some perspective, UT coach Bruce Pearl was a couple of weeks shy of his seventh birthday back then.
“Did I ever imagine this?” said Smith, repeating a reporter’s question. “In my dreams, maybe. To be here cutting down the nets, putting on a (championship) T-shirt and hat, it’s a dream come true.”
If there is a concern that this most storybook Big Orange basketball season could meet an unexpectedly early end, it might lie in that statement. Can these Vols — now rated fourth nationally, now on the edge of a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament — handle success as well as they have reversed the program’s many past failures?
Perhaps that’s why Pearl led off his postgame remarks following Sunday’s win over South Carolina by saying, “We have got a lot of work to do to get better.”
Perhaps that’s why Auburn coach Jeff Lebo recalled a similar situation in 1997 during his time as a South Carolina assistant.
“Once we’d done it (won the SEC regular-season title), we weren’t particularly good from them on for awhile,” said Lebo, mindful that the Gamecocks couldn’t get out of the SEC tourney semifinals, then were stunned by Coppin State in the opening round of the NCAA tourney.
“We hadn’t won anything in such a long period a time. We put such an emphasis on winning the regular-season championship. But in basketball sometimes you feel you have to keep doing it, then doing something more. Then there’s the NCAA tournament. It can be tough.”
Then again, Tennessee hasn’t done much of anything for so long — no appearances in the SEC tournament semifinals since 1991, no SEC tourney titles since 1979, no advancement ever past the NCAA tournament’s round of 16 — there would appear to be plenty of goals on the horizon.
“This is nice,” senior guard Jordan Howell said Sunday. “But there’s so much more we want to do. I don’t think there’s a team in the country that can beat us when we play like we know we can play. But we have to play well. This is strictly business now.”
Because of Pearl’s genius with X’s and O’s and Chris Lofton’s and JaJuan Smith’s genius knocking down 3-point shots from all points on the floor, business is good in Big Orange Country.
The Vols rank first in RPI and first in strength of schedule. Their six SEC road wins came by an average of 7.3 points. They led the SEC in scoring and scoring margin. Beyond that, 11 players average at least 10 minutes a game and eight average at least five points a game.
“I think it says a lot about our team that our leading rebounder (Tyler Smith) also leads us in assists,” Pearl said. “We’re a team with a lot of weapons. Depth is our strength.”
After watching the Vols defeat his Gamecocks by 33 points Sunday, retiring South Carolina coach Dave Odom believes the Vols have a lot of strengths.
“They may have the best sixth man in all of college basketball in J.P. Prince,” Odom said. “They’ve got great coaching, great shooting, excellent inside play and they play uninhibited. They’ve got all the ingredients to be a (national) champion. And nobody in this league has an organized plan more than Bruce Pearl does.”
The next stage on the way to a possible national championship is this weekend in Atlanta at the SEC tournament, where Pearl is winless in two seasons.
“Our fans have every right to be a little skeptical,” Pearl said of the SEC event. “But it’s very important for us to get the No. 1 (NCAA) seed. The prizes are getting larger. Everything is now designed to get us to San Antonio, Texas, for the Final Four. The thing we can do to help make that happen is to win the SEC tournament.”
Besides, Pearl said, winning the SEC and NCAA tourneys could be a piece of cake compared to winning the SEC regular-season crown.
“The SEC tournament is three or four games,” he said. “The NCAA tournament is six games. (The regular season) is like a heavyweight fight, 15 rounds or whatever it is, all the games you’ve got to play. I think winning the conference championship is more difficult than any of the (tourney) championships you play in.”
Like Odom said, Pearl always has a plan.
Mark Wiedmer started work at the Chattanooga News-Free Press on Valentine’s Day of 1983. At the time, he had to get an advance from his boss to buy a Valentine gift for his wife. Mark was hired as a graphic artist but quickly moved to sports, where he oversaw prep football for a time, won the “Pick’ em” box in 1985 and took over the UTC basketball beat the following year. By 1990, he was ...
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