Vandy sends Vols home; Barnes sees silver lining – Knox TN Today

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Posted by Marvin West | Mar 14, 2026 | westwords | 0
Tennessee losing to Vanderbilt is getting old. Football lost by three touchdowns. Women’s basketball took a hit. Rick Barnes’ group got beat twice in seven days.
Pass the aspirin. Dr. Danny’s all-everything athletics department is developing a headache.
The Commodores sent the Volunteers home from the Southeastern Conference tournament Friday with a determined 75-68 victory. Instead of a work of art, it was a slugfest disguised as basketball. Officials penalized an assortment of touch fouls but didn’t seem to notice the war under the rims.
As usual, the Vols couldn’t guard opposing guards. Duke Miles scored 30 on remarkable 11-of-14 shooting. He was four-of-five on threes. Tyler Tanner scored 19. He hit nine of 10 free throws.
Tennessee star freshman Nate Ament’s Friday game was almost opposite his Thursday performance. He shot down Auburn (27 points). He hit one of 13 field-goal attempts against the Commodores. Conditioning missed because of the ankle injury caught up with him. He was undoubtedly sore all over.
Nate refused to give up. He contributed 11 rebounds and 10 of 12 free throws.
Ja’Kobi Gillespie did all he could to take up the slack. He scored 21. JP Estrella had 12 points and six rebounds. Jaylen Carey scored 10 and claimed five rebounds. Felix Okpara fought a good fight and got eight points, six boards and five fouls.
Coach Barnes said “too many fouls at the wrong time in the second half would probably be the difference in the game from our perspective.”
Free throws were a bigger part of the story. Tennessee missed 10 of 26. Vanderbilt made 22 of 26.
Barnes said “second-half turnovers hurt us…they really came at the wrong time.”
Indeed they did. Two were decisive as Vanderbilt expanded a 63-62 lead with a flurry of free throws.
Barnes spotted what might be a silver lining in the defeat. Extra time off may help his tired team and certainly improve Ament’s chances to be near normal for the upcoming NCAA tournament opportunity.
“Sometimes there is a blessing in disguise. You always want to win, but if we’d won today, would we have played Nate tomorrow? I don’t know. He’s not 100 percent. We know that. But in his mind, it doesn’t matter, he wants to play.
“It would have been difficult if he didn’t play at all in this tournament. To miss two and a half, three weeks, it would have been hard. Even though he does everything he possibly can, there’s nothing like playing, especially this time of year.
“Again, we certainly want to win.”
Barnes paused for a few seconds.
“Maybe the loss gives Ja’Kobi Gillespie a chance to get more rest. Ja’Kobi has logged a lot of minutes. Maybe just a couple more days here.
“Certainly we want to win the SEC every chance we get, every time we play, in the regular season, post-season. We all know that next week’s the big one. Hopefully what we learned here the last two days, what we learned throughout the entire year…”
Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington didn’t have to search for a positive.
“Tennessee and Vanderbilt have had some terrific games this year. It’s two teams that are evenly matched. I just love our will to be able to pull out these last two. It’s hard to beat a team in back-to-back games.
“I just thought our guys, they played super aggressive. I love it that they were attacking the entire time. Just their mentality. It was fun to coach ‘em. Heck of a game. We’re fortunate to be able to move on.”
Byington and I saw the same game.
“We’re winning in a way that sometimes isn’t beautiful, but as a coach it does feel beautiful. We’re winning tough, grind-it-out, physical games that are hard-fought.”
Marvin West welcomes comments or questions from readers. His address is [email protected]
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Marvin West has lasting credentials. He was sports editor of the student newspaper at the University of Tennessee in 1954. In what was then considered progress, he became sports editor and then managing editor of the Knoxville News-Sentinel. He went to Washington as national sports editor of Scripps-Howard News Service. He organized and directed coverage of World Series baseball, Final Four basketball, Super Bowls, Masters golf and seven Olympics. In Washington as in Knoxville, West was promoted to managing editor. He oversaw a staff of 90 and edited a daily news wire. Scripps had 410 newspaper and radio station customers. West was inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers’ Hall of Fame. He is a member of four other halls and was named a “Distinguished American” by the National Football Foundation. Vol athletes chose him as an honorary letterman. In semi-retirement, he wrote four books and a few hundred columns for MexConnect. Marvin and Sarah had a winter home in Mexico for more than two decades. The Wests, married 70 years, live in Union County, on Norris Lake. Sandra Clark interrupted his budding career as a bass fisherman and recruited him for The Shopper. He followed her to KnoxTNToday.
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