KNOXVILLE – Out on the Thompson-Boling Arena court, the one filled with dancing Tennessee Volunteers and a certain former Tennessee football coach turned athletic director who was campaigning for basketball coach Rick Barnes to be “national coach of the year,” the school’s first Southeastern Conference regular-season (co)-championship since 2008 couldn’t have been sweeter Saturday evening.
It wasn’t so much that the Big Orange came from behind very late to knock off Georgia 66-61. A lot of teams have come back late this season against the Bulldogs, who have lost second-half leads of eight or more points on at least four occasions in league play, as well as seeing a four-point lead become a loss in the final 2:28 of Wednesday’s home game against Texas A&M.
But it was very much a series of earlier events that helped produce this win, as well as so many of the Vols’ 22 earlier victories this season against a total of seven losses.
“Not bad for a team that was picked to finish 13th in the preseason,” said Barnes, referring to the, gulp, media poll from late October.
But it was something else he said that said it all: “We started working for this the week after last year’s SEC tournament. Hardest spring I can remember. They spent spring time on the track running. Things I hadn’t done in 15 years. You don’t want to be on spring break as a basketball player. You want to be on the court, in the tournament. So I told them we were going to work like we were in the tournament. And we did. All conditioning.”