The 23rd NCAA tournament appearance in Tennessee men's basketball history will also be the 25th for Rick Barnes as a head coach.
Neither Barnes nor the Volunteers, however, have been through a 68-team extravaganza like this one.
Tennessee was selected as the fifth seed in the Midwest Region and will face 12th-seeded Oregon State at 4:30 p.m. Friday at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on TNT. The Vols remained in Nashville after Saturday's 73-68 loss to Alabama during the semifinals of the Southeastern Conference tournament, and they were scheduled to bus from the Music City to Indianapolis on Monday morning.
After that, it's any guess how the first NCAA tournament staged during the coronavirus pandemic transpires.
"I don't know," Barnes admitted Sunday night on a Zoom call. "In the past, we knew we had to get there a couple days early and do press conferences, and I would assume that would be the same thing like we're doing right now. In the past, we set up our own off-site practices, and I don't think it will be that way, but I don't know. We're going to be locked in, and I don't know if anybody in this tournament knows what it's going to be like.
"We're getting there four days before the actual game, and I don't know where we'll be assigned to go practice. I think we'll all end up doing a lot of work in hotel ballrooms. I've heard they've got all the teams in four hotels, I think, and they're going to keep each team on a floor by themselves."
The Vols (18-8) learned of their pairing against the Beavers (17-12) from a Nashville hotel ballroom, where they watched the CBS selection show. Barnes even admitted that moment was unlike Tennessee's 2018 and 2019 invitations and other selection experiences he has amassed at Providence, Clemson and Texas.
Barnes made 17 consecutive NCAA tourney trips from 1996 to 2012, with that run highlighted by his 2003 Texas team reaching the Final Four.
"It was very different from the past," Barnes said. "To be quite frank and honest, when it came up, there were a couple of claps, and then everybody got up and walked away. We felt like we would be seeded fifth or sixth - we are excited to play, but it's just different.
"You could put down two basketball courts in this ballroom that we're all spread out in, and once it popped up, there were some claps, and the next thing I know is that everybody is going to get ready to eat."
Oregon State played its way into the 68-team field by winning the Pac-12 tournament. The Beavers were just 14-12 after the regular season but then defeated three NCAA-bound teams as the league's fifth seed - UCLA (83-79 in overtime), Oregon (75-64) and Colorado (70-68).
Though it seems like a lifetime ago, Tennessee opened this season Dec. 8 with a 56-47 win over Colorado in Thompson-Boling Arena.
"They're playing their best basketball at the right time, and I like to think that we're on the verge of doing that as well," Barnes said. "I think we're good enough to play anybody and beat anybody in the tournament. I really believe that. I would love to have everybody, and there were only a few weeks when we had the whole team together.
"I would love to see a full roster, but we're not afraid to compete against anybody."
Injury update
John Fulkerson, who suffered a concussion and a facial fracture in Friday's SEC quarterfinal win over Florida and didn't play against the Crimson Tide, traveled back to Knoxville on Sunday morning with Tennessee head athletic trainer Chad Newman, met with a local specialist and underwent a procedure. The 6-foot-9, 215-pound senior forward from Kingsport was scheduled to rejoin the team Sunday night.
Newman, incidentally, is a Chattanooga native and a Central High School graduate.
Odds and ends
Vols senior forward Yves Pons was named Sunday to the SEC's all-tournament team, joining Alabama's Jahvon Quinerly (MVP) and Herb Jones, and LSU's Trendon Watford and Cameron Thomas. "It was just unbelievable how he was in those games in so many facets of what he did," Barnes said of Pons. Tennessee has a 22-22 career record in the NCAA tournament, while Barnes has a career mark of 24-24. Oregon State and Tennessee are among six teams in the Midwest Region that have orange as their dominant color, with the others Clemson, Illinois, Oklahoma State and Syracuse.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524. Follow him on Twitter @DavidSPaschall.