Vols seniors seek April end

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Laughing and prancing inside the Tennessee locker room Saturday afternoon, senior guard JaJuan Smith hardly acted like a guy whose next college basketball loss could be his last.

“It’s just March,” he said with a wide smile. “It’s not over until April, right? The Final Four’s in April.”

If there is to be an April for the East Region’s second-seeded Vols, most believe Smith and fellow senior Chris Lofton will both need to deliver big numbers against Butler this afternoon.

After all, Butler didn’t just win the Great Alaska Shootout in November, blow out Ohio State in December and win 14 of its last 15 games on luck alone. The Bulldogs can both shoot and defend — especially at guard, where seniors A.J. Graves and Mike Green are averaging nearly 30 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists combined.

Or as Smith said, “Coach (Bruce Pearl) just told us we’re going to have our hands full from beginning to end.”

So unless the Easter Bunny intervenes, should the Big Orange lay a big Easter egg today, yet another UT hoops season will end short of the Elite Eight, much less the Final Four.

But for sophomore center Wayne Chism and sophomore forward Tyler Smith — if he doesn’t turn pro — there’s always next year. They can use a loss to Butler as motivation for next season, much the way JaJuan Smith and Lofton and fellow senior guard Jordan Howell used last year’s regional loss to Ohio State to push this season’s team.

But for those three, this is it. Each game could be their last in Big Orange.

“I try not to think about it,” Lofton said Saturday. “We’re just trying to focus on Butler. That’s enough to worry about. But we know it could be over at any time.”

It hardly seems possible. It seems like yesterday that Lofton was debuting that pillow-soft shot of his out in Hawaii under former UT coach Buzz Peterson. In just his second college game he scored 22 points against eventual national champ North Carolina. He hit six 3-pointers in that game and now has 426, the third most in NCAA history.

No wonder he became the first Vol since Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King to grace the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was placed on its NCAA tourney issue this past week.

“Chris Lofton will go down as one of the greatest players to ever wear this uniform,” Pearl said. “He’ll join the likes of Ernie, Bernard King, Dale Ellis, Allan Houston. I cannot imagine what coaching a basketball team is going to be like without him.”

But in his own way JaJuan Smith has been just as amazing. After averaging 25 points at McMinn County, he walked on at Tennessee. Yes, walked on. But he could always shoot. His first basket was a 3-pointer against Texas. He totaled six points in 13 minutes against UT-Chattanooga, which had recruited him.

Then Pearl arrived and everything changed. He went from scoring 1.9 points a game as a freshman to over nine a game as a sophomore. He’s averaged around 15 each of the last two winters. He currently has 1,361 points, good for 19th on the Vols’ all-time list.

“Everybody talks about Lofton, and he’s as good as there is,” Arkansas coach John Pelphrey said last week. “But JaJuan Smith is right there with him. He can shoot, he can defend like crazy and he’s a tremendous athlete. Both those guys can tear up your defense, I’ll tell you that.”

No one can tell for certain what happens next. With Duke and Clemson already out of this NCAA tournament, it’s possible that the Atlantic Coast Conference was overrated this season, which means Tennessee’s path through top-seeded North Carolina might not be as difficult as first imagined, even if third-seeded Louisville looks as if it might be tougher than predicted.

But Butler must come first. The Bulldogs dismantled Tennessee a year ago in the Preseason NIT. When the senior Smith stumbled across Pearl replaying tape of that game early Saturday morning, he heard Pearl muttering, “Dang it, JaJuan. Dang it, JaJuan.”

Said JaJuan: “I took two bites of scrambled eggs and got out of there as quick as I could.”

It has all gone too quickly, these past four years with Lofton and JaJuan.

“It’s been spectacular to this point,” Pearl said. “We’re talking about magic, and going someplace that a Tennessee basketball team has never been.”

We’re talking about getting to April, where no UT men’s team has gone before.