KNOXVILLE-The bus carrying the Tennessee basketball team rolled back into Knoxville on Saturday.
“The mood on the bus is somber,” associate head coach Tony Jones wrote on his Twitter account Saturday afternoon.
That’s not surprising, considering the tumultuous season the Volunteers endured and the thud it ended with in Friday’s 30-point loss to Michigan in the NCAA tournament in Charlotte.
“It was a tough, tough season, up and down – lot of adversities we had to face,” senior point guard Melvin Goins said Friday. “It was a real tough season.”
“It’s just tough to go down like that,” said freshman standout Tobias Harris, “especially for senior guys like Melvin and Steven Pearl and the rest of the seniors. [They] put all they could into this program. Seeing them in the locker room is just real disappointing.”
Goins, Pearl, Fields, guard Josh Bone and center Brian Williams all played their final games as Vols on Friday. Harris and leading scorer Scotty Hopson might have as well, depending on whether they decide to be eligible for the NBA draft.
UT began the season 7-0, winning the NIT Season Tip-Off with victories over NCAA tournament teams Virginia Commonwealth and Villanova and beating Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh. The season tailed off from the there, as the Vols were consistently inconsistent and went just 12-15.
The Vols had to deal all season long with the situation surrounding coach Bruce Pearl and the NCAA, from a league mandated eight-game Southeastern Conference suspension to the release of the NCAA’s Notice of Allegations hours after a big road win at Vanderbilt.
Coach Pearl’s future remained uncertain for at least another day. He said after the game that he didn’t know the timetable of his postseason evaluation with the university and athletic director Mike Hamilton.
“Number of things and he just told us to learn, learn from this, and that was basically it,” Goins said of Pearl’s postgame speech to the team in the locker room. “Just learn from it and the attitude of the team and just stick together as men and as players. He doesn’t know the future, so he didn’t really speak too much about that. He just said he doesn’t know what the future might hold.”