The Tennessee basketball team lost a heartbreaker on Wednesday night as they fell on the road against Ole Miss. This one came right down to the wire as it was tied up with less than a minute to go, and the Rebels made enough plays down the stretch to earn the big upset win. Ole Miss ended up winning the game 78-76, and Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes was not pleased after the contest.
Tennessee had multiple leads in the second half, but they weren’t able to come away with the victory. One thing that hurt the Volunteers was three-point plays as Ole Miss was able to take advantage of a lot of them, and Rick Barnes wasn’t happy about it.
“It’s ridiculous. And we talk about having confrontation. We play like we were — that’s soft, honestly. That’s being soft,” Barnes said after the game, according to an article from Rivals. “That’s you not really trying to go in and make plays on the ball. And guys slide out of the way. There’s got to be a confrontation there. And we’ve been a pretty good rim-protecting team this year, but we weren’t tonight. And you can’t give up, I mean, I don’t know how many and-ones. And we foul on a three-point shooter again, give up a four-point play there. We foul 75 feet from the basket, things like that. That’s a recipe for losing. And that’s what we did.”
Barnes gave Ole Miss head coach Chris Beard a lot of credit for how the Rebels played, but he also didn’t think that his team played up to their typical standard.
“Give Coach (Chris) Beard and his staff credit,” Barnes added. “I thought he had his guys much more ready to play than I did. And some of the plays we gave up, forget the last two minutes. It’s the things we did throughout the game, not sticking to our scouting report, transition defense, going at it half-speed, offensive rebounding on their half. They had 46 points in the second half and we just weren’t making plays. But again, I don’t want to take anything away from them. I told our team, I thought (Ole Miss) wanted the game more, which is always disappointing. And we didn’t have the focus that we had.”
At the end of the day, Barnes just didn’t think his team deserved to win on Wednesday night.
“We didn’t deserve to win this basketball game,” the 10th year head coach said. “When you make those kind of mental mistakes, you don’t deserve to play against the team that is well-coached and played as hard as they played. And they made shots on us. But again, you let a team get comfortable and you’re not as aggressive and you’re not playing smart. Offensive rebounding can just take the wind out of your sail. And they did a great job getting there and, I mean, I think 46 points in the paint.”
There were a lot of things that the Tennessee basketball team did not do well in this game, but hey, at least it happened now and not in the postseason.
“I don’t know what else I can say. Just disappointed,” Barnes continued. “Most of the time in games like this, certainly from where I’m sitting right now, I think you get what you deserved. And we deserve to lose because we didn’t make enough plays to win the game. And I think you got to give them all the credit because even when we had a chance to maybe stretch it out a bit, (we had) some turnovers, just throwing the ball out of bounds, not getting the ball inbounds, all those type things.”
The Tennessee basketball team is now 24-6 overall and 11-6 in SEC play. They have one more regular season game as they will be hosting South Carolina on Saturday.
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