Where did it go wrong?
A season of high expectations for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga men's basketball team turned into one with a finish to forget, with losses in its final five games and eight of its last 12. The chance for a return to the NCAA tournament ended with a 79-67 loss to Wofford in the quarterfinals of the Southern Conference tournament.
Although seemingly unlikely, the Mocs' season may not be over. At 19-12, they could choose to play in a pay-for-play postseason tournament, such as the College Basketball Invitational or the CollegeInsider.com tournament.
Maybe it was doomed from the start. Lanky forward Traevis Graham was arrested on July 30 after an incident at an East Ridge bar. Then, right before the start of the season, the Mocs' frontcourt depth was hurt even more when Chuck Ester - who had performed as the team's best player until that point - tore an ACL on the first play of a scrimmage against Auburn.
Maybe it was too easy last season. On the way to the 2016 NCAA tournament, the Mocs never had a multi-game losing streak. Things were almost never difficult on the court, even when Casey Jones was lost for the season by dislocating his ankle (they won at Dayton a night later) or when they suffered lackluster losses at Western Carolina (they won two nights later at East Tennessee State) at UNC Greensboro (they beat Samford a week later to claim the SoCon top seed).
UTC finished with 29 wins and the program's first NCAA tournament appearance since 2009, and with the return of five seniors, the expectations were sky-rocketed this season.
This season the Mocs sailed to a 9-3 record through nonconference games, including wins over Tennessee and Jacksonville State, the latter of which won the Ohio Valley Conference tournament. Once conference play began, things started to unravel slowly.
By that point, it was clear that Jones wasn't the two-time first-team All-SoCon player he was before last season's injury. There were flashes, but he was never able to get to that point.
As the season wore on, seniors Greg Pryor and Tre' McLean started pressing, according to coach Matt McCall, with expectations ramping up around them.
McLean, the preseason player of the year in the league, still had a solid season, setting career highs in scoring (13.7 ppg) and 3-point showing (39 percent), while Pryor averaged a career high with 12 points per contest and 39 percent from 3. Yet more of the offensive load on the perimeter fell on their shoulders.
McCall spoke about togetherness a lot through the season. The Mocs had plenty of it in his first season, but that "connectedness" was deficient this time around.
"The bottom line is, when you're a really connected team, you've got a chance to win and win big," McCall said. "I feel we never got there. It's not one thing or one person, but we never got the connectedness we needed. Chuck makes the game easier and I think we saw that, but we still had enough to win and that's the disappointing piece, so as a coach, I've really got to take a step back and evaluate our roster and evaluate the pieces we have and the pieces we need.
"That's my job here, to get the guys that are really, really committed to playing the right way, that will be about the right things and will go out and represent this university the right way. That's my job here."
Once taking the job in April of 2015, McCall took the light-hearted approach to a team with 10 juniors and seniors, essentially putting his arms around the them and attempting to be embraced by players. He was the third UTC head coach for some of them, and some just flat-out didn't want him, preferring former assistant Wes Long, who followed former head coach Will Wade to Virginia Commonwealth.
This season the 10 upperclassmen turned into six seniors, which turned into five after the Ester injury, plus new guys.
"The big challenge for me as a coach was walking through the door and connecting with a group of seniors and juniors one way," McCall said. "Then you lose half of them and you bring in a new crop of guys, you've got to be two different coaches.
"Going forward there's none of that."
Three-time conference defensive player of the year Justin Tuoyo said last week that all of the turnover on the roster was "hard" to deal with. Instead of relying on seniors and juniors off the bench, the Mocs needed the sophomores and freshmen to contribute big minutes and production on both ends of the floor. Sometimes they did; other times they didn't.
"When you have other seniors on the court with you - started with you, been through a lot of stuff with you - you talk to them differently," Tuoyo said. "You know certain things, they know certain things, so you adapt to that easily, but then you have guys that haven't played a college basketball game until this year. They've never really had this opportunity.
"We've never really had freshmen here like that, never had freshmen that played like that, so you've got to coach them differently, talk to them differently, be a different type of guy for them.
"It's tough, but everybody knows we all want the best for each other."
Now Tuoyo is done. So are McLean and Jones, two-time all-conference selections; Pryor, the 2016 SoCon tournament most outstanding player and a 2015 all-conference selection; and Johnathan Burroughs-Cook, who averaged 9.3 points and was the only player to start all 31 games this season. McCall said the entire remaining roster will be evaluated this week.
He already has five players signed for the 2017-18 season: incoming freshman guards Jalen Crutcher and Terry Nolan Jr., forward DeMarcus Mitchell and junior college transfers Joan Duran and Eric Turner. McCall hinted that there could be more turnover before the Mocs take the floor in the season opener.
"We're going to evaluate every single piece," he said. "Obviously there are certain guys we feel good about going forward, but us as a program we need to do some soul-searching. It's going to be hard; it's going to be really, really hard and really, really difficult. My job now over the next eight months is to create as much adversity as possible, starting this week. Who really, really wants to be here? Who wants to be out there doing the right things and representing the program the right way? On the floor, through work, grinding, hard work and getting back in the gym.
"We've got to be able to play the game for each other, have a connectedness out on the floor. Piece by piece our roster will be broken down - obviously we need more guys that can put the ball in the basket, that's been a struggle - but we're going to get it corrected. It's my job to get it corrected, and I'm committed to that."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenleytfp.