KNOXVILLE – This loss will leave a mark.
As quickly as Tennessee’s men’s basketball team seized control of Tuesday night’s game at Ole Miss, the Volunteers gave it away with a dreadful display to allow the Rebels to reverse a 13-point deficit and win 80-69 in Oxford.
The Vols overcame a slow start with a 7-0 spurt to close the first half and a 14-1 run to open the second half, but Tennessee made just three of its final 21 shots and had no answer when Ole Miss raised its intensity and outscored the visitors 41-17 in the final 15 minutes.
“I never felt like we were really in control,” Vols coach Rick Barnes said during his postgame news conference. “You know they’re going to make a push at it at the end, but from that point I thought they took it to another level. I didn’t think we matched their intensity right there, and we started taking bad shots, just being careless and couldn’t make a shot.
“The floor wasn’t balanced. I don’t know how many run-outs they had where they went down the floor. We fouled way too much. You put a team on the free-throw line 42 times, that’s a lot, and there were a lot of fouls in the game.