Vols’ fans skeptical but abundant

ATLANTA — Before the Tennessee men’s basketball team arrived here for the Southeastern Conference tournament, Volunteers coach Bruce Pearl joked about the Big Orange Nation’s reluctance to believe UT could win the event.

Noting the 29 springs that have passed since the Vols’ last tourney title, the 11 straight losses when reaching the tournament quarterfinals and his own 0-2 record on this stage, Pearl said, “Our fans have every right to be a little skeptical.”

So you could imagine the pressure the Vols must have felt Friday afternoon inside the Georgia Dome with 16 seconds left and South Carolina one point ahead of them on the scoreboard.

Lose here and that NCAA tournament No. 1 seed would be gone with the wind. Lose here and concern could replace confidence as UT’s chief emotion heading into NCAA play. Lose here and the remarkable number of Volniacs who had ignored history to splatter the Dome in pale orange might just bill Pearl for all those three-night hotel minimums they’d have to eat.

So Pearl called time out and drew up a play that he later claimed contained two options. The first was for Chris Lofton to screen for JaJuan Smith. The second was for Wayne Chism to screen for Lofton.

Yeah, right.

This is not to question Pearl’s sincerity. All good coaches publicly speak of three, four, five possibilities on every play, even if smoke would shoot out their ears, dryboards would explode and scholarships would be stripped if their preferred option wasn’t followed to a Tennessee T.

As for possibly choosing option A over option B, even Pearl knew this talk of Lofton screening for JaJuan Smith was as believable as Barack Obama joining Hillary Clinton’s ticket next week.

In fact, the coach later admitted, “I don’t think our guys were looking for anything but the second option.”

Here’s why: Despite having missed eight of his first nine 3-pointers, Lofton swished a 25-footer to deliver UT an 89-87 victory.

“As a shooter you always think the next one is going in,” Lofton said as he left the court. “They hadn’t up to that point, but Coach called my number, and I hit it.”

And when he hit it, UT was going on to an SEC tourney semifinal game for the first time since 1991. The Vols face Arkansas at 1 p.m. today.

That’s remarkable, of course, given UT’s rancid history in this event for most of the past 29 years. But it’s not necessarily the best part of the story. For that we turn to retiring South Carolina coach Dave Odom, who had expected to find a Georgia Dome feverishly cheering for the underdog.

“I didn’t think (other schools) would be pulling for Tennessee because they don’t want to play them,” Odom said. “I thought we would have a little more support today. But I underestimated the wallets of the Tennessee people. I mean, they were in the eyesight of everybody today.

“They went out and bought tickets, much like (Kentucky) Wildcats usually do. Wildcats better get in line if they want to buy tickets.”

This is what conference tournament basketball is all about. It’s about the fans. It’s about giving the fans a concrete reason to pay for three nights’ worth of hotels and buy ticket books at more than $200 a pop.

It’s about hope and dreams and having a reasonable reason to believe, which Pearl has done from his first Tennessee breath forward, though it took a couple of Marches to undo a previous 27 years of futility.

And Pearl has a message for anyone who thinks Friday was as good as it will get for Volniacs.

“Here’s what I think about the crowd support,” Pearl said. “If you think it was good today, it’s going to be unbelievable tomorrow. I’m just happy for our fans that we’re still in this tournament and they get to celebrate a little bit. We’ll work, they can celebrate.”

For the first time in 29 years, that formula is working to a Tennessee T.