During the 2018-19 basketball season, Tennessee won 23 of its first 24 games and spent a program-record four consecutive weeks at No. 1 in the Associated Press poll.
The Volunteers were truly elite two years ago, spending the entire season as a top-10 team and winning 31 games before enduring an overtime loss to Purdue in the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16. This season’s team was showing similar promise by racing to a 7-0 start, but then came Saturday night’s stunning 71-63 setback against Alabama inside Thompson-Boiling Arena, when the Crimson Tide outscored the Vols 30-12 from 3-point range.
Will that defeat wind up serving as a needed jolt for another stellar season, or will it be the first of several indications that this is a solid squad but nothing special?
“This was definitely a humbling experience for us, and I definitely think it will be a lesson for us,” sophomore guard Josiah-Jordan James said minutes after Tennessee fell to 7-1 and 1-1 in Southeastern Conference play. “We definitely would have wanted the picture-perfect season and gone undefeated and all that, but this just shows we have to get better. This is a lesson we can either learn from or let it kill us, and we’re definitely going to learn from it.
“We’ve got the guys in the locker room to do that.”