It's not every year that Tennessee enters the Southeastern Conference men's basketball tournament as a projected No. 1 seed for the NCAA tournament.
This is the first such occasion, actually.
Yet how much does maintaining that projection serve as motivation for the top-seeded Volunteers as they near Friday's quarterfinal contest (1 p.m. Eastern on ESPN) against ninth-seeded Mississippi State in Nashville? The Bulldogs reached the quarterfinals with Thursday afternoon's 70-60 comeback triumph over eighth-seeded LSU.
"You hear people say that conference tournaments can wear you out, but I don't think any player or coach enters a game thinking you benefit by losing," Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Wednesday in a news conference before the team left Knoxville. "When you're where we are and with the year that we've had, I just think you go take care of business and that business will take care of itself.
"I think what matters more are the matchups you get when the brackets come out. That probably plays more of a role than seeds."
Tennessee, which is 24-7 overall and won the SEC's regular-season title with a 14-4 league record, is longtime ESPN analyst Joe Lunardi's fourth projected No. 1 seed behind Purdue, Connecticut and Houston. North Carolina is Lunardi's top projected No. 2 seed and owns a 100-92 victory over the Vols in the ACC/SEC Challenge back on Nov. 29.
Mississippi State's triumph has provided Tennessee a revenge opportunity, with the Bulldogs having handed the Vols their first league loss, 77-72, in Starkville on Jan. 10. Josh Hubbard came off the bench to score 25 points that night, going 5-of-10 from 3-point range, while Tolu Smith III added 23 and got the better of Tennessee junior forward Jonas Aidoo.
Aidoo was held to nine points and fouled out.
Should Tennessee beat Mississippi State, the Vols will have defeated each of the 13 other league teams at least once in the same season for the first time since the SEC expanded to 14 members before the 2012-13 season.
"Obviously they won the league, and you can't argue that they're the best team over an 18-game schedule, which to me means more than anything," Mississippi State coach Chris Jans said Thursday in a news conference following the win over LSU. "We have great respect for Coach Barnes, their staff and their players. It will be intense.
"They play a hard-nosed style. We're trying to play a similar style. I think it will be an intense basketball game, to say the least."
Lunardi said Thursday afternoon that Mississippi State punched its NCAA tournament ticket with its topping of LSU. The Bulldogs went just 8-10 in league play this season but improved to 20-12 by advancing Thursday.
"We're in the SEC tournament right now," Smith said. "We're not in the NCAA tournament. We're focused on the SEC tournament, and we'll try to keep advancing.
"We're not ready to go home. We are packed till Sunday."
Odds and ends
Tennessee has reached the championship game in three of the last five SEC tournaments that were played to completion, losing to Kentucky in 2018 and Auburn in 2019 before defeating Texas A&M in 2022. ... Barnes is seeking his 200th career win with the Vols against 99 defeats. ... Tennessee junior point guard Zakai Zeigler needs 12 points to reach 1,000 for his career. ... Fifth-year senior guard Santiago Vescovi has 206 career steals and is five shy of sharing the program mark set by Vincent Yarbrough from 1998-2002.
Paris staying put
Former University of Tennessee at Chattanooga coach Lamont Paris achieved his first SEC tournament win Thursday, as the second-year mentor at South Carolina guided his Gamecocks to an 80-66 thumping of Arkansas to set up a Friday quarterfinal showdown with Auburn following the Vols-Bulldogs opener. Paris, the SEC coach of the year, and his team improved to 26-6.
Paris and South Carolina have agreed to a new six-year contract through the 2029-30 season that will pay him more than $4 million annually. He has been making $2.3 million and was linked to the Ohio State opening given that he is from the Buckeye State and his background as a Big Ten assistant at Wisconsin.
"This is where I'm supposed to be," Paris said on the SEC Network after the rout of the Razorbacks. "I've had great conversations with our athletics director, Ray Tanner, and we're really happy with where the program is. People talk about a lot of other opportunities that are there or might be out there, but this is where I'm supposed to be.
"I love where I am, and I love this group. We've made it official pending the board's approval, and we'll see how that goes."
The board approval is expected Friday morning.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.