KNOXVILLE – Rick Barnes is always going to give his honest assessment about his basketball team, and Tennessee’s loss to Vanderbilt on Wednesday was no different.
The Volunteers trailed by 21 points at halftime and by 28 in the second half before making the final score (88-74) more respectable in garbage time.
“We were just awful,” Barnes said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. We didn’t do anything that we wanted to do offensively. We didn’t run anything in transition, other than one or two sets maybe (when) we’ve got four or five things we can do. We just came down, did the same thing and never got the ball moving.
“The ball stuck too much. Guys would get the ball and dribble, dribble, dribble. You go back to the games when we’re (at our) best, the ball is popping, it’s moving.
“We didn’t deserve to win. That was the team that I think that everyone expected us to be at the beginning of the year.”