Luke Winn of SI.com has a good piece about Tyler Smith, who transferred from Iowa to Tennessee to be closer to his father, who has lung cancer, and Winn says the addition of a player with Smith's talents has expectations in Tennessee really, really high:
What Smith will do is turn the Volunteers into legitimate national-title contenders -- and that means he is of paramount importance.... That added dimension could very well be the key to the Vols reaching the Final Four in Pearl's third season.
We had the Vols seventh in our Premature BlogPoll, so they're certainly in the Final Four mix. The addition of Smith might be the last piece of the puzzle.
This week, FanHouse is taking a way too early look at the top teams heading into 2007 with a BlogPoll decided on by our college hoops bloggers. It's a time-honored filler for the off-season, and who are we to buck tradition? Today we look at teams 10 through 6.
Say "Tennessee" and you tend to think of three things: Tennessee football, women's basketball, and Peyton Manning.
Men's hoops coach Bruce Pearl wants to change that, and in two years he's made a big dent in the traditional alignment of the SEC East. Beating Kentucky twice and Florida thrice since his installation as head coach, Pearl has already won the eastern division (first year) and brought Tennessee to second place in '07. The Vols also made a run into the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament, losing a heartbreaker to Ohio State after enjoying a 19 point second-half lead.
Bruce Pearl's '07 squad might be the best ever to take the court in Knoxville. Guards Chris Lofton, Ramar Smith and Jujuan Smith (no relation) might be the best backcourt in the conference while sophomores Wayne Chism (6' 9") and Duke Crews (6' 8") were an awesome front-court duo as freshman.
The popular expectation is that the battle for SEC supremacy will be centered around Tennessee and Kentucky, and that's a fair bet. At the moment, Tennessee is holding all the cards and anything short of an SEC championship will be a serious disappointment.
Chris Lofton revealed to the Knoxville News Sentinel that he would have gone pro after the 2007 basketball season if it wasn't for problems with his ankle.
"I was gonna go," Lofton said from his home in Maysville, Ky. "It was just that my ankle, my injury, slowed me down a lot, and I couldn't work out for any teams. That forced me to come back."
Well, give the kid points for honesty. But Lofton might benefit from a little coaching on how to best couch his comments to the media. I'm sure Vol fans want their star player courtside because he wants to be there, rather than "forced".
One Vol fan commented on the story and probably spoke for at least a few others. "billschwartzjr" wrote:
I could have gone a long time and admired Lofton for wanting to stay his senior year to help and be a part of the run that is getting ready to happen. Now I know he wanted to leave for the money and forget the team that helped him get to where he is. I will always remember him in a different light!
Regardless of the circumstances, Bruce Pearl will field his best team yet at Tennessee in 2008, and Lofton is the Vols' most dangerous weapon. However they get him, Tennessee fans should be grateful to have senior sharpshooter Chris Lofton on the hardwood.
In two years on the job, Bruce Pearl has already done more with Volunteer basketball than anyone could have expected. Yet suddenly, the expectations are about to get higher than ever before. Tennessee native Tyler Smith has transferred to Tennessee from Iowa and was granted a waiver that will allow him to play for the Vols this season. Smith was released from Iowa and granted the waiver in part because his father, who lives in Tennessee, is ill.
The Tyler Smith saga has been interesting, to say the least. It was just a couple of years ago that Smith had signed with Tennessee as a Buzz Peterson recruit. But when Buzz was fired, Smith wanted out of his commitment, while Pearl wanted a chance to re-recruit him. Smith opted to play at a prep school instead of coming to Tennessee, then went to play for Peterson's friend Steve Alford at Iowa. When Alford and the Hawkeyes parted ways, Smith asked to be released so he could move back closer to his ailing dad. Now, instead of sitting out the requisite year that usually accompanies a transfer, Smith will join the team immediately.
Just as immediately, expectations for the 2007-08 season are rising to unprecedented levels.
Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt won her seventh national title Tuesday night, beating Rutgers 59-46 and re-establishing Tennessee as the top women's basketball program in the country.
The victory (Summitt's 947th career win) also established Summitt as the best basketball coach -- male or female -- currently working in college basketball. And I'd got one step further than that and call her the best college basketball coach since John Wooden led UCLA's men's teams to 10 titles from 1964 to 1975.
Summitt has now won national championships in three different decades and coach of the year awards in three different decades, and when she's done coaching she'll have a total victory mark that no coach will be able to approach (for sake of comparison, she's five years younger than Mike Krzyzewski and more than 150 wins ahead of him).
No college basketball program will ever match what Wooden did at UCLA, but Summitt's Tennessee teams come the closest. She's the best in the business.
Someone let Florida Coach Billy Donovan know that he can control some of the coaching carousel speculation around him if he wants. Bruce Pearl did it nice and quickly to before there was even any major issue as to whether he would leave Tennessee for Iowa.
The men's basketball coach was contacted Tuesday by Iowa athletic director Gary Barta, who got clearance the night before from Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton to talk to Pearl, a former Iowa assistant.
Pearl told Barta he was not leaving Tennessee, and then he wanted fans to know.
"I'm putting it out there just as fast as I can because I don't want it to be a concern of our fans, and I want to demonstrate my loyalty and my commitment to this program. I appreciate very much being here, so I don't want them to worry about me going anywhere," Pearl told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "This is where I want to be. I want to be here as long as they'll be happy with me here."
In a statement issued by the school, Pearl expressed appreciation for support from fans, administrators and other coaches, namely football coach Phillip Fulmer and women's basketball coach Pat Summitt.
"It was never a consideration for me to leave Tennessee," Pearl said in the statement. "I had a phone conversation with Iowa's athletic director early this morning as a courtesy for a place I have coached at and have great respect for. The University of Iowa is an outstanding school, and I know they will find a quality coach to continue their strong tradition of great basketball."
And now the issue is over. In a way, I'm a little saddened. There is this whole hatred Illinois fans have for Pearl because of his part in entrapping exposing some recruiting shenanigans at Illinois in the late 80s. Illinois already has a hate going at Indiana with Kelvin Sampson grabbing top point guard Eric Gordon after he verballed to Illinois. This would just fire up the Illini up against another Big 10 school even more. That's always fun.
Ah, well. It's good for Tennessee at least. Iowa is rumored to be interested in Dana Altman at Creighton, but he seems very content where he is.
Greg Oden will not be the best player on the floor in Thursday night's Ohio State-Tennessee game. Oden will be the most talented player, and he'll have the brightest NBA future of anyone out there, but Tennessee's Chris Lofton will be the best.
Lofton might be the most under-appreciated player in the country this season. Against Long Beach State in the first round, Lofton stole the ball and raced down the court to score, then stole the inbounds pass and got a quick layup, then trapped the subsequent inbounds pass and forced Long Beach State to take a time out.. It's that type of play that made Lofton a third-team All-American, and he would have been better than that if not for an ankle injury. And even though that ankle injury caused him to miss four SEC games, he was the SEC player of the year.
So does all this mean Lofton is going to lead the Vols to an upset of the Buckeyes? It's still a long shot. Tennessee got a pretty generous 5 seed from the Selection Committee, meaning the Vols are clearly not as good as the No. 1 Buckeyes. But if Lofton plays the way he's capable of playing, they just might pull the upset. And a whole lot of casual fans who only know Greg Oden will learn the name of another college basketball star.
Why did Xavier fail to seal the deal after holding a big lead against Ohio State Saturday? One reason is that the referees decided not to call an intentional foul on Greg Oden. But another is that Xavier didn't use the correct end-game strategy with a three-point lead and just seconds left in the game.
Xavier made one of two free throws after Oden's foul, giving Ohio State the ball and a three-point deficit with a few seconds to go. If Xavier had fouled, Ohio State would have had an extremely difficult task: Make the first free throw, then intentionally miss the second, get the offensive rebound and hit a put-back. Instead, Xavier just went into its normal half-court defense, giving Ohio State's Ron Lewis the chance to shoot a three-pointer, which he hit to send the game into overtime. Ohio State dominated from there.
At Sportsline, Gregg Doyel has a great column exploring the proper strategy in this situation. As he notes, Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl was faced with a similar situation against Virginia, and Pearl told his players to foul, thus virtually guaranteeing victory for the Volunteers. How anyone can get a job as a Division I head coach and fail to see that this is the right strategy is beyond me.
Yoni Cohen disagrees, but Cohen's disagreement seems to be for aesthetic reasons -- he thinks it's bad for the game at large. I suppose that's true in the same sense that games get boring when the opposition keeps fouling Shaq (or Courtney Paris), but that doesn't change the fact that for coaches, it's the right move.
For the last few years, it has become almost an article of faith in the NCAA Tournament that at least one #5 seed will go down to a #12 seed. It was just a matter of picking out which of the #5 seeds were going to crash and burn. This year that seemed especially easy because just about every #5 seemed to have obvious flaws that suggested quick failure:
Butler stumbled down the stretch and was facing a hot team in Old Dominion
Virginia Tech was so inconsistent
USC only got that high a seed because they had a hot streak in the PAC-10 Tournament, but they got blown out in the Championship
Tennessee probably looked like they had the best match-up in the first round with Long Beach State.
Not only did all four make it past their first round opponents, three of the four -- Butler, USC and Tennessee -- beat the #4 seed in their bracket to get to the Sweet 16.
Of course, their reward for getting to the Regional Semi-Final is to face the #1 seeds -- all of which advanced. What luck.
Luke Winn of SI.com has a good piece about Tyler Smith, who transferred from Iowa to Tennessee to be closer to his father, who has lung cancer, and Winn says the addition of a player with Smith's talents has expectations in Tennessee really, really high:
Chris Lofton revealed to the Knoxville News Sentinel that he would have gone pro after the 2007 basketball season if it wasn't for 
In two years on the job, Bruce Pearl has already done more with Volunteer basketball than anyone could have expected. Yet suddenly, the expectations are about to get higher than ever before. Tennessee native Tyler Smith has transferred to Tennessee from Iowa and was 
Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summitt won her seventh national title Tuesday night, 
Someone let Florida Coach Billy Donovan know that he can control some of the coaching carousel speculation around him if he wants. Bruce Pearl did it nice and quickly to before there was even any major issue as to 
Greg Oden will not be the best player on the floor in Thursday night's Ohio State-Tennessee game. Oden will be the most talented player, and he'll have the brightest NBA future of anyone out there, but Tennessee's Chris Lofton will be the best. 
Why did Xavier fail to seal the deal after holding a big lead against Ohio State Saturday? One reason is that the referees decided not to call 
For the last few years, it has become almost an article of faith in the NCAA Tournament that at least one #5 seed will go down to a #12 seed. It was just a matter of picking out which of the #5 seeds were going to crash and burn. This year that seemed especially easy because just about every #5 seemed to have obvious flaws that suggested quick failure:
