Raborn: Fans shouldn't expect Tennessee basketball to be elite

When you hear “the University of Tennessee,” what do you immediately think of?

Easy. Football, Peyton Manning and national championships.

The Tennessee basketball program will always play second fiddle to the football program, just as Kentucky football will always ride the coattails of basketball.

Since 1939, the year NCAA Tournament was conceived, the Volunteers have only made it to one Elite Eight, seven Sweet Sixteen’s and have won the SEC a grand total of four times, the last one coming in 1979.

Tennessee is obviously not one of the premier college basketball programs, making it difficult to snag premier coaches who refuse to play second string to another athletic program on campus. For the Vols, they haven’t been relevant since the Bruce Pearl era.

Fans had a reason to expect an elite team during the tenure of Pearl because he produced the highest amount of sustained excellence the program had ever seen. His early teams included a pair of outstanding guards in CJ Watson and All-American Chris Lofton. Pearl regularly locked in top-10 recruiting classes and, for the first time in Tennessee history, the basketball program rivaled the football team. In his six years in Knoxville, Pearl accumulated a record of 145-61.

Since Pearl’s departure in 2011, the Vols haven’t been ranked in any preseason or postseason polls. Cuonzo Martin hopped on over from Missouri State and led Tennessee to 49 wins in his first two seasons before finally breaking through in 2014 by leading Tennessee to the Sweet Sixteen.

However, there was turmoil leading up the tournament run. Hundreds of thousands of fans petitioned for the university to rehire Pearl and kick Martin to the curb after a slow 16-11 start. These were the same fans that would later watch their favorite team reach the Sweet Sixteen only a month later. Granted, the path to the Sweet Sixteen was an easy one — they won favorable matchups over UMass and Mercer before losing a nail-biter to Michigan — the fans still failed to recognize Martin kept the program stable after the loss of Pearl due to NCAA violations.

To put it simply, fans were spoiled by the Pearl era. They all of the sudden forgot the Tennessee basketball program wasn’t elite. After losing to the Wolverines, Martin jumped ship and took the head coaching job at California, likely because of his treatment by the fans in Knoxville.

So how did the Volunteer athletic program respond? By hiring Donnie Tyndall, who led Tennessee to a 16-16 record in 2015, the program’s worst winning percentage since the Buzz Peterson era.

Once again, the Vols were plagued with an NCAA investigation. Tyndall was fired after allegations of recruiting violations during his tenure at Southern Miss, leaving Tennessee with its third coaching search in only four seasons.

They decided on Rick Barnes, who has totaled only 31 wins in his first two seasons, but has appeared to stabilize the program after one bad decision after another.

For some reason, fans continue to hold high expectations for a basketball program that simply doesn’t have the capability of producing the same product as the football team provides. The days of Pearl selling out 21,000 seats at Thompson-Boling Arena are over.

In fact, not only is the basketball team irrelevant on a university scale, but also on an SEC scale. The sooner fans recognize that the program will likely never return to its short-lived glory, the mediocre seasons will become easier to digest.

Edited by David Bradford

Featured image by Brad Blackwelder