KNOXVILLE - After Saturday's win against Alabama in the regular-season finale, coach Rick Barnes summarized Tennessee's basketball season by dividing it into three sections.
The Volunteers began the season with zero expectations.
Then they played some ranked teams competitively and strung together five wins in six games to create some expectations and turn an NCAA tournament bid from wishful thinking into an actual possibility.
With the stakes in February higher than anticipated, Tennessee faltered down the stretch, lost six of eight and became hard to watch at times until the stirring rally past the Crimson Tide.
In the end, the Vols went from being picked 13th in the Southeastern Conference preseason poll to a ninth-place finish and now face Georgia in the SEC tournament Thursday afternoon in Nashville.
"I think we should have been better," Barnes said Monday. "I feel we like we're better than where we are, but you are who you are. We were in a position coming down the stretch, and the thing that we didn't do - and what I have tried to say by no expectations to creating expectations and then not handling expectations - we didn't take it to another level.
"I'm talking about intensity and I'm talking about focus. Every week, once you get into February, you've got to get better or you're getting worse, because other people are going to keep getting better. I felt like we leveled off with the mental side of it. I don't think we had bad days of practice. But did I see us moving the needle just a little bit forward? I didn't."
Tennessee's four-spot improvement from the preseason poll to the final standings matches South Carolina (from eighth to fourth) as the best jump in the conference. Ole Miss (ninth to sixth) finished three spots higher and Alabama (seventh to fifth) and Arkansas (fifth to third) two spots better than what they were picked. Texas A&M finished 10th after being picked third.
Despite the freshman- and sophomore-laden roster, Barnes said the Vols "never saw ourselves" as the 13th-best team in the SEC, and the coaching staff believed there was enough talent to push for a spot in a postseason tournament.
Instead Tennessee enters this week as a long shot for the National Invitation Tournament.
"When you're picked down that low, I don't think you can ever say that's who we are," Barnes said. "If it is, we've got to change it. We felt like we had recruited some good players. You all asked the other night about Grant (Williams). We thought we had a guy in him who could play. We knew Admiral (Schofield) would get better.
"We expected everybody on the team coming back to get better. We knew we'd be young. With the schedule we played, we felt like we would find out early if we were good enough. I think our early schedule proved to us that we were good enough. I said to them, 'We're good enough. Now are we tough enough mentally to do this and grind this out all year?'
"We haven't proven that part of it yet."
Tennessee showed signs in November and December with competitive performances against Wisconsin and Oregon in the Maui Invitational, the near upset of North Carolina and a spirited rally against Gonzaga, and the Vols hammered ACC upstart Georgia Tech to open December and closed the month with wins at East Tennessee State and Texas A&M.
The Vols peaked at the end of January with five wins in six games, a stretch including a win at Vanderbilt, an upset of Kentucky and routs of Kansas State and Auburn.
Tennessee's February collapse began with blowing a 19-point lead in a loss at Mississippi State. The Vols threw away another double-digit second-half lead and lost to Georgia. Then the bottom fell out with blowout losses at Kentucky and South Carolina, a home no-show against Vanderbilt and the decided defeat against league cellar-dweller LSU.
"Once you get into February," Barnes said, "you've got to be really tough mentally to keep grinding when everybody's fighting for something and the intensity goes up. Our goal was, and it'll always be, to be an NCAA tournament team. We're not there. That was our goal and it always be.
"We knew there was a building curve here, but I just think you've got to set high and lofty goals and go after them."
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.