For someone who supposedly came to Tennessee to coach out the string, Rick Barnes sure has won a lot of games along the way.
When Barnes was hired by former Volunteers athletic director Dave Hart on March 31, 2015, there were critics who viewed the transaction as bringing in damaged goods. Barnes was already 60 years old, and he had just been fired at Texas after 17 seasons that yielded 16 NCAA appearances and a trip to the 2003 Final Four but also 11 opening weekend exits in the March extravaganza.
His hiring came at a time when the thrills of the Bruce Pearl era were continuing to fade, as Tennessee had made just one of the previous four NCAA tournaments. Barnes was also Tennessee's third coach in three years, following Cuonzo Martin and Donnie Tyndall, and the Vols were coming off a 2014-15 season in which they finished 10th in the Southeastern Conference with a 7-11 league mark.
"Actually, before the final week or so that I was at Texas, Dave and I had started talking a little bit indirectly," Barnes said last weekend in Charlotte. "When Dave hired me, he said, 'We've had good teams here. We've got a great tradition. We're looking for stability. We're looking for consistency.'
"I grew up three hours from Knoxville (in Hickory, North Carolina), but I had no idea the support we got from our fans, not only in basketball, but in football and in every sport. It's truly amazing, but those were kind of my marching orders, so we set out to do that."
Fast forward to the present, and Tennessee is the only SEC school to play in each of the past six NCAA tournaments. His Vols opened NCAA play last Thursday night with an 83-49 throttling of Saint Peter's, and they advanced again Saturday with a 62-58 defeat of Texas.
Tennessee has made consecutive Sweet 16 appearances for the second time in program history and for the first time since Pearl's Vols attained the feat in the 2007-08 tournaments. The Vols are 26-8 and seeded second in the Midwest Regional, and they will resume play Friday night (approximately 10:10 on TBS) against third-seeded Creighton (25-9) in Detroit.
A win inside Little Caesars Arena would enable Tennessee to reach the Elite Eight for the second time, with Pearl's Vols having reached that round in 2010.
Thoughts of an Elite Eight were light years away in Tennessee's first season under Barnes in 2015-16. Featuring a roster with an average height of 6-foot-4, the Vols lost senior point guard and leading scorer Kevin Punter Jr. to injury in mid-February and stumbled to a 15-19 record that included a 6-12 conference ledger, though there were bright spots in home victories over Florida and Kentucky.
Barnes and the Vols improved slightly to 16-16 and 8-10 in 2016-17, with that roster containing sophomores Admiral Schofield and Kyle Alexander, redshirt freshman Lamonte Turner, and freshmen Grant Williams, Jordan Bone, Jordan Bowden and John Fulkerson. In other words, that team laid the foundation for the 26-9 and 31-6 teams that followed.
Tennessee shared the 2018 SEC regular-season title with Auburn, and its 2019 team spent a month at No. 1 in both major polls.
"We targeted some young guys we wanted to go after and tried to bring in five or six guys we were going to build around," Barnes said. "We were able to do that and got it going."
That four-year run was more than enough to justify bringing Barnes aboard, but another rebuild was in order after the Vols lost a 99-94 overtime contest to Purdue in the 2019 Sweet 16. Enter Josiah-Jordan James and Santiago Vescovi, who arrived after the significant departures of Schofield and Williams and are now in their fifth years in the program.
"I can't really say it was me and Santi solely," James said in Charlotte. "We had leaders like Jordan Bowden, Lamonte Turner, John Fulkerson and Yves Pons, guys who were on that 2018-2019 team who were really talented. They were great leaders for us, and once those guys left, the weight was on our shoulders as leaders.
"I think we've done a great job of upholding the standard and having Tennessee be the standard of SEC basketball, but in this tournament, we're trying to make Tennessee the standard of all college basketball and trying to be the last team standing."
With the two wins in Charlotte, Barnes increased his career victory count to 805 through stops at George Mason, Providence, Clemson, Texas and Tennessee, and he is now 201-100 late in his ninth season with the Vols. He is on the doorstep of passing Don DeVoe's 204 career wins at Tennessee, which would move him into second behind the legendary Ray Mears, who amassed 278.
A win over Creighton would be the ninth NCAA tournament triumph for Barnes, which would break a tie with Pearl for the most in program history, and he has accomplished this stability and success under four athletic directors — Hart, John Currie, Phillip Fulmer and Danny White.
"There have been some different ADs in and out once Dave stepped away from it," Barnes said, "but this administration is the best I've ever been around when you think about Randy Boyd as the president of our UT system and Donde Plowman — I've never been around anybody on campus that's led the way she has. With Danny White, you talk about a makeover, and it's just amazing what he's done for every sport.
"I'm telling you, Tennessee is a special place. It really is, and I've been blessed from the time I've gotten there. I can't imagine there's a better place in the country right now to be associated with."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.