KNOXVILLE – It was early Monday afternoon inside Thompson-Boling Arena and Rick Barnes was preparing his basketball team for Tuesday night’s visit from South Carolina some 18 hours away.
“Just do what I tell you to do when I tell you to do it,” he said to more than one Volunteer, more than a slight hint of exasperation in his voice. “How many times do I need to say that?”
If college basketball coaches everywhere aren’t quite at the season’s dog days, they’re close. A season that began for most folks by the second week of November is now two months long. Conference play’s begun. The haves and the have-nots are starting to separate themselves. Time to put up or shut up.
Only with Barnes’ Big Orange bunch it’s not so clear cut. Much as last season ebbed and flowed far more than Barnes might have preferred, so it’s also been this season for the Vols, who are No. 22 in the latest Associated Press poll. Now 10-4 overall, they enter the South Carolina game with a 1-2 league mark, though it’s also fair to say that UT will be far from the only Southeastern Conference squad to lose road games at Alabama and LSU.
What is probably more frustrating is a team that knocked down 17 3-pointers early in the season against UT-Martin has hit but 23 of 87 in league play and 10 of those makes came from a single player – junior Santiago Vescovi.