Tennessee must somehow stop Ohio State without touching them

Stopping Evan Turner doesn’t seem to have much to do with beating Ohio State… of course that’s partially because UCSB was the only time he failed to get into double digits that couldn’t be attributed directly to his injury.

Seems like to biggest correlation is in bugging Lighty and getting him to turn it over… plus keeping a hand in Diebler’s face.

On another note, I can’t believe that the #2 team in our region only goes 2 deep into their bench.

…I think the only team from the SEC that the national media pays attention to in the slightest is Kentucky. They’re just far more interested in the Big East and ACC and whatnot.

I came to this conclusion (or I should say had my conclusion confirmed) after seeing coverage (or the lack thereof) of the SEC Tournament on national websites and blogs and so forth. Some of them didn’t even cover it at all, at least not until they looked up while watching the ACC championship and noticed that Miss. State was beating Kentucky with five minutes to go.

The major national sites covered it, but only gave it a cursory look, and that includes ESPN, who paid a large sum of money to broadcast the tournament for the next 15 years. I assume that at some point they’ll figure out that it would behoove them to talk about it during Championship Week, and they’ll tell they’re talking heads to do so.

But anyway, I don’t think anyone has watched us, really. Because nobody nationally watches SEC basketball. It’s just as simple as that.

Looking at big national games we’ve had that somebody actually might have watched, you’re looking at Kansas and the first Kentucky game. The second Kentucky game was only a regional game, if I’m not mistaken. And nobody really knew what to make of the Kansas game.

And the media just finds us uninteresting for some reason. Perhaps they’ve already rehashed the arrests story so much that they feel they’ve milked it dry (and they’re probably right about that), and they don’t see anything interesting about our team other than that. We don’t have any players that anybody’s interested in nationally, either.

If we beat Ohio State, we’ll at least get noticed. We might still have people picking us to lose the regional final, but we’ll at lest be acknowledged. If we had played and beaten Georgetown, we would’ve gotten noticed also. But we played Ohio instead. Pretty much everybody in the national media agreed that we were going to easily beat Ohio, by the way. They don’t think we’re awful…they just don’t think we’re interesting, either.

And for those expecting us to get noticed after throwing everybody’s SDSU upset pick back in their face, they didn’t actually think SDSU was that great. They’re required to pull some upset picks out of their rear-ends. I think they picked us to lose because they really didn’t know anything about us and everyone was interested in the Mountain West at the time. I don’t think anybody was overly surprised when we actually did beat them.

put down his beer, and play the adversity card. Adversity, adversity, adversity—isn’t that supposed to be the biggest canard trotted out this time of year? Don’t we deserve a soft-focus feature and some violins? Are we really so ugly to look at?

Maybe we’ll get some press.