All the pre-Christmas cupcakes have been consumed.
Tennessee may have played the last expected mismatch of its 2021-22 basketball season with Tuesday night’s 96-52 pummeling of USC Upstate in Thompson-Boling Arena. Next up for the 18th-ranked Vols is Saturday afternoon’s game against Memphis in Nashville, which will be followed by Wednesday night’s hosting of No. 8 Arizona and a Dec. 29 trip to No. 6 Alabama that will open Southeastern Conference play.
“Basically you’re starting your conference schedule right now,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said after Tuesday’s win. “If you think about our next three non-league games being Memphis, Arizona and Texas (in late January’s Big 12/SEC Challenge), that’s what is left. All of them are extremely talented, well-coached teams. Our league is here. The fact of the matter is that we have to be ready.
“This is the time of year that everything you’ve done up to this point is pretty much to get you ready for these types of games.”
The Vols already have faced Villanova, North Carolina, Colorado and Texas Tech through an 8-2 start that has yielded a lofty No. 6 placement in the NET rankings.
Two hours after the Tennessee-USC Upstate massacre, Memphis was completely changing the narrative of its season with a surprise 92-78 hammering of the visiting Crimson Tide. Memphis was just 5-4 and among the nation’s biggest disappointments before Tuesday’s game, having dropped four consecutive contests and losing to the SEC’s lower-echelon likes of Georgia and Ole Miss.
“It was a big game for us obviously,” Tigers coach Penny Hardaway said in a news conference following the upset. “To me, it was a must win. We were down in the dumps, honestly, and we knew we had to play our best game.”
Saturday’s showdown in Bridgestone Arena (noon on ESPN2) will contain three of the top-10 national signees in the 2021 class – Memphis forward Emoni Bates (No. 5), Memphis center Jalen Duren (No. 6) and Tennessee point guard Kennedy Chandler (No. 9). Duren had 14 points against Alabama on 7-of-9 shooting, while Chandler that same night racked up 15 points and 10 assists against the Big South Conference’s Spartans.
This in-state matchup is the third in a three-game series that began with Tennessee’s 102-92 win at Memphis in December 2018 and continued with the 51-47 Memphis triumph at Knoxville in December 2019. The rubber match was set for last December but was pushed back a year amid the coronavirus outbreak so it could be held without attendance limitations.
“I’ve only gotten to play them once, but I already love this rivalry,” Tennessee junior forward Olivier Nkamhoua said. “I think it’s great. I was excited the first time, and I’m very excited this time too. We get to go to Nashville to do it, the heart of the state.
“I know they’re ready for us. It’s going to be choppy. It’s going to be fun, and I think it’s going to be a great game.”
The Vols and Tigers had played just once before meeting annually from 1988 through 2001. The series was briefly halted and then resumed from the 2005-06 to the 2012-13 seasons, with the first three of those games containing the fiery matchups of coaching counterparts John Calipari and Bruce Pearl.
On Feb. 23, 2008, Calipari’s Tigers and Pearl’s Vols entered their collision in Memphis ranked 1-2 nationally, with Tennessee prevailing 66-62 to ascend to the top spot for the first time in program history.
Tennessee’s triumph three years ago in Memphis had Vols players upset with the Tigers “flopping” during the contest, and double technicals were called on Jordan Bone and Alex Lomax in the final minute. Hardaway after the game said, “Alex is a kid who’s not going to talk trash, so obviously Jordan Bone said something.”
When Barnes a couple days after that victory expressed disappointment that Hardaway would call out Bone by name, Hardaway responded by saying it was “low class” for the Vols to accuse the Tigers of flopping.
Tennessee leads the series 15-12, but no pairings have been scheduled between the two after Saturday.
“I’ve said from the first day that I took this job that I think that the University of Tennessee has to have a presence in Nashville,” Barnes said. “I’ve also said that I think it’s important that we play in-state teams. We still believe that. Going forward, certainly we’ll talk about it, as we do every year.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen with the expansion in terms of teams coming into this league quicker than we think. Looking forward, does that mean we’re going to play more conference games? I don’t know.”
Odds and ends
Tennessee senior forward John Fulkerson is scheduled to play in his 142nd career game, matching the program high set by Wayne Chism from 2006-10. In their 51-47 loss to Memphis two years ago, the Vols shot 25% from the floor (15-of-60), the lowest accuracy rate of the Barnes era.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.