Don't dismiss Rick Barnes, Tennessee this March: Dalton Knecht could transcend history

Picking a Rick Barnes-coached team to flop out of March Madness earlier than expected is like predicting a sellout for the Super Bowl or a rain delay at Wimbledon.  

It happens practically every NCAA Tournament. 

Barnes’ track record in March would normally make it easy to dismiss Tennessee, the No. 2 seed in the Midwest Region and SEC regular-season champion, as a real Final Four threat. But this year, picking against Barnes also means picking against Dalton Knecht. 

And that looks like a riskier proposition. 

When the season began, most college basketball fans would not have even known how to pronounce Knecht – for the record, it sounds like "connect" – much less where he had been before transferring to Tennessee or what he was capable of on a basketball court. Northeastern Junior College and Northern Colorado don’t exactly get much play on ESPN.

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But Knecht turned out not just to be the best player in the SEC and a first-team All-American, he might be the one player Barnes has coached since Kevin Durant with an ability to overcome the disastrous way his teams typically play in March.

Even for Durant, whose Texas team lost in the second round way back in 2007, that was too much to ask.

"Don't ever, ever, ever take for granted how hard it is to get here to start with, and then how hard it is to win a game and then another game," Barnes said last year after the Vols got upset by Florida Atlantic in the Sweet 16. "Because it's really, really hard."

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We know, Rick. You remind us every year. 

As one of the game’s great gentlemen and honest brokers, a Tennessee run to the Final Four for the first time in school history would be popular among the coaching fraternity. At age 69 and coaching a team that relies so much on its trio of fifth-year seniors, this may be Barnes’ last, best shot. 

But the record is what it is. 

Barnes has coached in 27 NCAA tournaments – a relatively enormous sample size that illustrates his consistent excellence in the regular season but also provides undeniable context to how disastrous March has been for him.

In nearly three full decades of tournament coaching, a Barnes-coached team has pulled an upset over a higher-seeded opponent just once.

Once!

And that was way back in 2002 when his Texas team advanced to the Sweet 16 as a No. 6 seed by beating No. 3 Mississippi State. Three coaches produced more upsets than that in last year’s tournament alone.

On the other side of the coin, Barnes has been knocked out by a lower-seeded team in 16 of his 27 tournaments. Some of those were essentially coin flips: Twice he lost as a No. 4 seed to a No. 5 seed in the second round, and three times as a No. 8 seed to a No. 9 in the first round. But there have also been quite a few bad losses and missed opportunities:

• Last year, No. 4 Tennessee lost to No. 9 FAU in the Sweet 16
• Losing as a No. 3 seed in the Round of 32 to No. 11 seeds in 2022 and 2018
• One first-round loss in the 5-12 game
• Two first-round losses in the 6-11 game
• Losing a Sweet 16 game as a No. 3 seed to a No. 7 in 2004

These things happen in the tournament, of course. But they happen to Barnes at a rate that defies probability, given how many quality teams he’s taken to the Big Dance.

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It's not a coincidence. But it would be lazy to say that Barnes "can’t coach" – which is clearly untrue given that he’s won more than 800 games. 

The reason his teams underperform in the tournament, though, is pretty simple to explain. When Barnes’ teams have converted their favorable seeds into deep tournament runs, it has correlated with having a top-10 offense. 

Going back to 2002, which is the earliest year KenPom.com began tracking efficiency, Barnes has had a top-10 offense five times. Those years resulted in: Final Four (2003), Elite Eight (2006), round of 32 (2007), Elite Eight (2008) and Sweet 16 (2019), the last of which was an epic, back-and-forth 99-94 loss to Purdue. 

When the offensive profile isn’t statistically strong – and it’s been pretty bad for most of his tenure at Tennessee – Barnes’ teams tend to get dragged into the muck and struggle. In a tournament where opponents have time to prepare and premium coaches can use the lengthy timeouts to make mid-game adjustments, Barnes’ teams simply become more vulnerable to upsets than the average top-four seed. 

There’s reason to once again be concerned about Tennessee’s offense. The Vols were tracking toward a No. 1 seed this year until losing at home to Kentucky in the final game of the regular season and then getting blown out, 73-56, in a rather lifeless SEC Tournament performance against Mississippi State. 

Tennessee will enter the NCAAs with the 28^th-ranked offense, according to KenPom – once again, very much in the upset zone. 

"I’m concerned," Barnes said after the Mississippi State game. "I don't know if I'd say 'worried,' but I'm always concerned about where we are, our mindset, what we're thinking."

The numbers and the track record suggest Tennessee won’t score enough to make a Final Four breakthrough. But don’t dismiss the possibility Knecht can put the Vols on his back for four games. 

A year ago, 247 Sports ranked Knecht as the nation’s 13^th-best transfer coming out of Northern Colorado, which meant he was projected to make an impact but not necessarily be transformational. Instead, Knecht has put together one of the great out-of-nowhere seasons in recent memory, averaging 21.1 points on 46.5 percent overall shooting and a tick under 40 percent from the 3-point line.

At 6-foot-6, Knecht can get shots off against physical defenders. He has deep range. He’s aggressive going to the rim, averaging 5.7 free-throw attempts. He’s had 39- and 40-point games just in the last 2 ½ weeks. He’s an individual scoring machine who doesn’t need great offense to help him get makeable looks. 

He’s exactly the kind of player Barnes hasn’t had enough of to pull the Vols out of the mud they usually find themselves in during tournament games. And he could explode into one of this month’s big breakout stars – if his team hangs around long enough.

For Tennessee, another early exit would be predictable given its mediocre offense and late-season struggles. But the potential for Knecht to transcend Barnes’ terrible March history gives the Vols a once-in-a-generation chance to reach a Final Four.