Tennessee coach Cuonzo Martin embraces Tennessee guard Josh Richardson
after the the Vols’ win against Mercer.We spent a lot of quality time discussing the Tennessee Volunteers basketball team on “Press Row” on ESPN 105.1 FM this week. A lot of time.
The Vols have earned it, too. They looked as good as any team in the first two rounds of the tournament, pasting UMass and Mercer. It was impressively impressive and has flipped the script on the narrative that is The Conz.
Cuonzo Martin was in the crosshairs of the fan base, a collection of folks who had tasted extreme and overnight success in six glorious years of Bruce Pearl. In the middle of February, the Vols were teetering on the edge of the Dance, and if they were left out for the third straight time in The Conz’s three years, well, who knows what the future would have been. The famous petition that drew more than 30,000 signatures to bring Bruce back to Knoxville became the storm cloud of contention within and surrounding the program.
No one needs to concern themselves with that setting now — unless, of course, The Conz wins two more games, gets to the Final Four and becomes the hottest name on the coaching carousel. And if The Conz becomes a name to know in the coaching search circuit and is coveted, if he leaves it would be the most ironic thing since Alanis Morissette put her mic down.
And to be fair, the bashes and criticisms from the Vol Nation and their angst about the shuffling performance in the season’s first 25 games, well, the poetry of the last 10 games proves that the Vols sorely underachieved through the first two-thirds of the season.