Rick Barnes has racked up 750 college basketball victories as a head coach while taking teams at Providence, Clemson, Texas and Tennessee to a combined 25 NCAA tournaments with a 26th trip coming shortly.
Barnes has coached 29 players who have been drafted into the NBA, with those players having combined to earn more than $1 billion. He won three Big 12 regular-season championships with the Longhorns and guided Tennessee to a share of the Southeastern Conference crown in 2018, but winning conference tournament titles just hasn’t been his thing.
When Barnes takes the Volunteers into this week’s SEC extravaganza in Tampa, Florida, he will be seeking his second career conference tournament championship and his first since the 1994 Providence Friars won the Big East. Tennessee last won the SEC tournament in 1979, but the Vols are the second seed this week and the league’s hottest team.
“I think the key is not to beat yourself by some of the things that we did last Saturday afternoon,” Barnes said Wednesday, referring to the 78-74 win over Arkansas after the Vols had built a 24-point lead. “Things like not being locked in mentally, turning the ball over and not rebounding the basketball – it will get back to fundamentals, but you’ve got to be locked in on the mental side of it.
“The game changes a little bit once you get into the conference tournament. Longer timeouts will start happening. This is a real rock fight, because we all know each other so well.”