University of Tennessee at Chattanooga guard Malachi Smith said multiple times this season that the Mocs’ lack of depth on the basketball court would not result in sympathy from opponents.
“No one is going to feel sorry for us right now,” Smith said after the Mocs improved to 8-0 with a road win at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on Dec. 16. “It’s a pandemic, obviously, and there are a lot of teams going through different stuff.”
Saturday afternoon in the Southern Conference tournament, a team that had gone through a lot of stuff came up against a challenge too mighty even for it.
Fifth-seeded East Tennessee State University, hungry for redemption after the Mocs won two tight contests to sweep the regular-season series with their rivals from Johnson City, won the third meeting of the season with UTC, 63-53 in the SoCon quarterfinals at Harrah’s Cherokee Center in Asheville, North Carolina.
The fourth-seeded Mocs played without Smith – a 6-foot-4 redshirt sophomore and All-SoCon first-team selection who led the team in scoring, rebounding, assists and minutes played during the regular season – and senior forward Darius Banks due to a “positive COVID-19 test and contract tracing within the team’s Tier 1 personnel,” according to a UTC release.