we should’ve been seeded worse than 6. I think everyone has defaulted to our last performance.

Too far?

Although the cab ride back to the suburbs west of boston will be hellacious.

“It’s not smart to give people fuel, and (Davis) just gave us that,” Maze said. “Clearly, on national television, they just said we were going to be the biggest first-round upset. That comment, I was rather disappointed in that. But you know what? That was just more ammunition and more fuel for us, as far as I’m concerned. I’m fired up, man. We’re all even more fired up now. I’m about to go get in some extra shots in the gym right now because of this.”

“[B]ecause of this”? Seriously? Not because the NCAA tournament is this week, but because Seth Davis said something stupid on national TV?

And didn’t the last two years do any balancing?

to keep hearing this. I tried to buy the flipping tickets months ago, and the price was already driven up. I don’t think it’s so much our fans are so bad, there’s just so many of those jokers up there that apparently have nothing else to live for.

The selection committee screwed this one up. But the Vols did themselves absolutely no favors with their occasionally flippant demeanor in front of cameras. Things like the ‘just Senior night’ bit and the way they appeared to be more concerned about style points in a few games gave the committee some negatives to focus on.

Like the NFL’s draft scouts, the committee members are at their core just a bunch of white-collar bureaucrats who are looking for reasons they can downplay a selectee. If Tennessee loses early, they’ll point at games like that last UK game and claim they were right. If UT does well, they’ll point to those very same games and claim that they couldn’t trust UT to bring a solid game.

Upside is not the issue with these kinds of selections. They’re looking for reasons to bury you, and UT gave them those. Honestly, it’s easier to predict these brackets if you ignore the best efforts from teams and look at which ones had the most glaring gaffes.

our season as a whole is definitely a 4 seed at worst. but if you weight it for recent play, im not sure i can argue too much.

We might have been out of the tourney all-together.

Somehow, that’s probably not enough to get the job done.

once one guy said it, it became conventional wisdom.
(apologies for yesterday, btw)

in comparison to other teams, what stands out about tennessee that we are the target of such hate? There are higher seeded teams that have just as many issues.

is jp prince. with the exception of the road vandy loss (maybe his best game of the season), he was a no show in all of the losses. in the first UK loss, he had a pretty stat line, but he also had 6 turnovers.

This is the best part:

Any of the top six [Midwest] seeds would be threats to win Duke’s bracket, and together they’ve got more NCAA Tournament experience than any other region in the field. By a lot. If you had to pick the handful of middle seed capable of deep tourney runs, the Midwest bracket is practically the entire list, while the the rest of the field is littered with stumbling teams like Vanderbilt, Villanova, Pittsburgh, and Purdue. It flies in the face of any and all logic.

Don’t tell them!

Your coach needs to make sure he watches some film of UT before Thursday night.

It will not be good to go off of this.

We have an 11 that should be a 9, a 6 that should be a 4, and a 3 that should be a 2. Ouch.

that’s just the point. We know you are good; we feel like we should get to play someone easier.

We finished third in the SEC behind an NCAAT #1 seed.
We played very well down the stretch, but we lost an ugly one in the SEC Tournament (to LSU, who finished last in the conference).
We were the popular pick to be upset in the first round by a hot team from SoCal.
Our potential second round matchup was against a team roughly equal in talent (who happened to be near DC).
Our potential Sweet Sixteen matchup was against Ohio State, led by one of the best players in the country.

I’d love to see this tournament work out like that one, except two points better against OSU.

You have to train yourself into that kind of mindset, and it’s not easy. It’s a matter of teaching yourself to approach every game as a must-win and putting everything into it that you can. The hard part is not going into cruise control against overmatched teams.

Think back to some of their games against easy teams like LSU in Baton Rouge. Sure, they won the game, but it was a sloppy effort. They didn’t play that one with the same attitude as the Kentucky games during the regular season. There are a few others you can look to and see the ‘relax and have fun’ mindset come out as well.

The problem with that is that, even though they were talented enough to win a few of those games that way, they trained bad habits into their minds. We learn through repetition, and if they had made a conscious effort to bring the same ethic to those easy games as they did against some of the nationally-prominent games, they would have had better mental routines programmed into their heads right now.

That’s why they’re so inconsistent; they don’t have a programmed mindset that can keep them focused from game to game. Sometimes they’ll come in sharp, but sometimes they’ll come in flat. But they don’t have the triggers in their mind to favor the sharp performances when they step out under the lights.

And it’s too late for that to happen now. They have to hope that luck is with them.

it means almost nothing to me.

And most of the Ole Miss game?

Wins, sure, but not exactly “our best basketball”.

I agree that we got screwed with our seed. But the last time we really played well was three games ago at Mississippi State.

What the heck has that got to do with anything. Delusional people may be confident they can fly, but that doesn’t mean they can.