KNOXVILLE – Get used to this, Tennessee. Get used to Memphis once more being Memphis, the most tradition-rich basketball program in the Volunteer State, even if its biggest moments often have come with asterisks, as in the NCAA later found some reason to erase them.
But that doesn’t erase the fact that the Tigers have reached three Final Fours since 1973 and played for two national championships, though they lost both of those contests.
And what Memphis did Saturday afternoon in Tennessee’s Thompson-Boling Arena hints that it just might have a team capable of reaching college hoops’ final weekend for a fourth time in school history, however ugly the Tigers’ 51-47 victory was by classic standards.
Still, as winning coach and Memphis basketball legend Penny Hardaway noted more than once after his 13th-ranked team’s ninth victory in 10 games: “It’s about being down two stars and winning on the road.”
Just to be clear, those two stars aren’t your garden variety players. Freshman center James Wiseman, all 7-foot-1 and 240 pounds of him, is currently sitting out a 12-game suspension mandated by – drum roll, please – the NCAA for wrongs allegedly committed by Hardaway to move the Wiseman family from Nashville to Memphis for his senior season of high school. Oh, by the way, Wiseman was the No. 1 player in the 2019 recruiting class and is projected by some to be the top player in the 2020 NBA draft.