It’s not every year that Tennessee enters the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament as a projected No. 1 seed for the NCAA tournament.
This is the first such occasion, actually.
Yet how much does maintaining that projection serve as motivation for the top-seeded Volunteers as they near Friday’s quarterfinal contest (1 p.m. Eastern on ESPN) against ninth-seeded Mississippi State in Nashville? The Bulldogs reached the quarterfinals with Thursday afternoon’s 70-60 comeback triumph over eighth-seeded LSU.
“You hear people say that conference tournaments can wear you out, but I don’t think any player or coach enters a game thinking you benefit by losing,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Wednesday in a news conference before the team left Knoxville. “When you’re where we are and with the year that we’ve had, I just think you go take care of business and that business will take care of itself.
“I think what matters more are the matchups you get when the brackets come out. That probably plays more of a role than seeds.”