KNOXVILLE - Tennessee's women made it through the storm of a tough stretch of basketball games.
The Lady Volunteers won only three of their last nine games, but seven of the nine were against NCAA-tournament-caliber competition. The reprieve during that stretch was two meetings with Vanderbilt, including Sunday's 67-63 win over the Commodores at Thompson-Boling Arena.
The Lady Vols are 18-9 overall and 8-6 in the Southeastern Conference and are tied with LSU (18-8, 8-6) for sixth in the league heading into the final week of the season. Those two teams split their regular-season matchups, but if they finish in a tie the Tigers would claim the six seed by virtue of their sweep of Texas A&M (22-5, 10-4) and their win over Kentucky (20-6, 9-5).
Tennessee finishes with games against Ole Miss (7-20, 0-14) at home on Thursday and on the road at Auburn (9-16, 3-11). LSU is home against Vanderbilt on Thursday before finishing the schedule at Arkansas (21-6, 9-5). The Lady Vols are a game behind Kentucky and Arkansas but would lose tiebreakers to both based on head-to-head losses.
Tennessee is listed as an 11 seed in ESPN's latest bracket projection, but coach Kellie Harper isn't worried about that.
"We have not talked about it," Harper said Sunday. "Again, we've got a game on Thursday, a game on Sunday, and that is our focus. We talked about how many days left we have before the (SEC) tournament. We talked about maximizing our off days, maximizing our practice days, maximizing our games and making sure that we are taking every bit of this opportunity to be a better basketball team before we go over to Greenville (South Carolina). That has been our focus."
Here are three observations from Sunday's win:
1. Horston was good, but : Tennessee needs Jordan Horston's playmaking ability on the court. Sunday she was good (five assists, just two turnovers), but that's been par for the course for the 6-foot-2 guard against what could be considered "inferior" competition, which would qualify for the teams Tennessee has beaten this season. She's averaged 5.2 turnovers per game in the nine losses - against teams with an average RPI of 18 - and 4.1 in the team's 18 wins, against teams with an average RPI of 121. She had five or more turnovers in seven of the nine losses, but as a natural playmaker she needs to provide more performances like the one Sunday when she took care of the ball.
2. Clutch Burrell: Sunday wasn't sophomore Rae Burrell's best game offensively, but seven of the Lady Vols' 12 fourth-quarter points came from the 6-2 sophomore wing, whose role, it seems, is to "just make plays." That included a possession in the fourth quarter when she lost her shoe on defense, grabbed it after a Rennia Davis rebound, sprinted upcourt, received a pass and made a layup while being fouled before tumbling into a cheerleader. Like Horston, Burrell is needed on this team to make plays, and Sunday when the team needed them most, she did just that.
3. The "cheap" points: Tennessee's inability to score the easy points has made things difficult for the team this season, but against Vanderbilt they made the difference in the win. The Lady Vols scored 18 points off 20 Vanderbilt turnovers and added 19 off 22 offensive rebounds. Those 37 points made a difference Sunday, and they'll make a difference any time Tennessee can get them.
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3 or at Facebook.com/VolsUpdate.