Barnes’ adjustments make bad loss worse
Tennessee was too good. On both ends of the court, especially in the second half which is always the critical half.
In the second half the Volunteers’ defense forced Arkansas into being a jump-shooting team and the one thing everyone knows is the Razorbacks are not a jump-shooting team.
When your leading scorer has 12 points and is 4 of 10 from the field with 1 assist and 4 turnovers, you have problems. Not blaming one person, it was a bad team loss.
Rick Barnes, the Tennessee head coach, may have been born at night but it wasn’t last night and at halftime he made defensive adjustments that left the Hogs almost paintless.
Forced to rely on jump shots allowed the No. 8-ranked Volunteers to jump out to a 27-9 second half lead and coast to a 92-63 win on Wednesday night in Fayetteville.
The loss leaves Arkansas with one option of making the NCAA Tournament: Win four games in four days at the SEC Tournament. While it has been done, and by the Razorbacks, it has only happened twice since the SEC expanded to 14 teams.
The Volunteers dominated the second half Wednesday night like they were playing at home and were up 81-55 with 6:50 to play and looked like they would decide the final score and Arkansas didn’t have a vote.
Eric Musselman looked like he was ready to pull his hair out in the second half as he tried combination after combination to try and slow the better team, who got 48 points in the paint to Arkansas’ 20.
What was worrisome for the Razorbacks was they played a really good first half and still trailed 46-40 despite hitting 14 of 27 from the field and 6 of 13 from behind the three-point line.
In the critical half, the Hogs were 8 of 31 from the field.
The Hogs had nine turnovers that were huge as the Volunteers cashed in for 17 first-half points off turnovers.
As hard as the Hogs were working, Tennessee matched them or beat them in effort and had eight more fieldgoal attempts — see the previous paragraph. But the Vols struggled on threes as the Razorbacks perimeter defense continued to show improvement.
Musselman started his 14th different lineup and by the half had used nine different players and players off the bench had 19 points to help keep the game close.
Barnes used nine players but had only nine points off the bench.
Barnes probably has the largest collection of orange neckties in the whole world.
The Hickory, N.C., native spent four years at Clemson, where he was 74-48. In 17 years at Texas, he was 402180 and made the NCAA Tournament every year but one and was fired after going 20-14. Then he landed at Tennessee for the past nine seasons.
In 2008, Barnes and the Longhorns ended up in the NCAA Tournament at North Little Rock. A few days before their first game, he said if the fans weren’t nice to his players he’d cancel the regular-season game the next season with the Arkansas Razorbacks.
He was kidding but some took it serious. So John Bianco, an associate Texas AD who did an internship at the UA, invited yours truly to the locker room before the game.
Barnes was friendly and explained he was just kidding and didn’t even make out the basketball schedule. But he was very distracted, as he should have been.
After about 10 minutes he asked if it would be OK if he took care of getting ready for that day’s game and not one the next season. We had a good laugh and I left.
The No. 2-seeded Longhorns beat Austin Peay that day, then Miami and Stanford before falling to Memphis, who had also started the tournament in North Little Rock, in the Elite Eight.