15. Tennessee
Fresh from its first NCAA bid in nearly a decade, Knoxville's "other basketball team" is ready to turn heads on campus
Posted: Wednesday November 18, 1998 02:05 PM
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Harris has to improve his shot selection and distribute the ball more. Bob Rosato |
Undefeated
basketball teams aren't supposed to get dissed. So naturally Brandon
Wharton was peeved when he overheard the following exchange
before a game last December between USC and the 9-0
Volunteers. "Is Tennessee any good?" one fan
asked. "Yeah, in football," his
friend replied.
Recalls Wharton, "I came back to the bench and told
everybody 'You won't believe what this man just said.' I
was waiting for them to start talking about Peyton
Manning."
It will take more than a modest winning streak for the
folks of Knoxville—besotted as they are with their
football, not to mention their women's hoops team—to
alter the barstool conversation in favor of Wharton and his
teammates. However, the gentlemen
Volunteers did raise their campus profile last spring by
reaching the
NCAA tournament for the first time since 1989. With the addition
of
6'7" forward Vincent Yarbrough, one of the nation's most
highly touted freshmen, to a Tennessee lineup that retains
its top nine players from last
season, Vols fans have even loftier expectations for the year
ahead.
So once more, with feeling: Is Tennessee any good? The
short answer is yes. For starters, point guard Tony Harris,
SEC
co-rookie of the
year last season, should be better. After missing 12 of 13
field goal attempts in the Vols' 82-81 overtime loss to
Illinois State in the first round of last year's NCAAs,
Harris spent most of the summer working on his outside
shot. "I just felt sick after
that loss," says Harris, who, in a remarkable display of
self-flagellation, has frequently reviewed tapes of that game.
"Coming in as a freshman last year, I felt like I had
to do it all by
myself."
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| STARTING LINEUP |
| POS. | HT. | CLASS | KEY STAT |
| SF Rashard Lee* | 6'6" | Sr. | 10.3 ppg |
| PF C.J. Black* | 6'8" | Jr. | 12.6 ppg |
| C Charles Hathaway* | 6'10" | So. | 6.4 rpg |
| SG Brandon Wharton* | 6'3" | Sr. | 15.2 ppg |
| PG Tony Harris* | 6'0" | So. | 14.2 ppg |
'97-98 record: 20-9
Final rank (coaches' poll): unranked
*Returning starter
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Harris and Wharton, the team's leading scorer last year and
a two-time All-SEC selection, form one of the
nation's highest-scoring backcourt tandems. The Vols are
solid up front too. C.J. Black, a
6'8" junior, led the SEC in blocks (2.5 per game) last
season, and
6'9" sophomore reserve Isiah Victor, a spring-legged
post player who shot 51% from the field in '97-98, has the
look of a guy ready for a breakout year. Charles Hathaway,
a
6'10" sophomore, has the potential to be one of the
SEC's top centers, but only if he sheds more of the 35
pounds he put on last season while recovering from surgery
to remove a blood clot in his shoulder.
How deeply Tennessee advances into the
NCAA tournament will depend in the end on the offensive juice it
gets from Yarbrough, a multidimensional swingman who is the
program's most hotly anticipated freshman since Bernard
King in 1974. Two summers ago
Vols coach Jerry Green twice had to talk Yarbrough, who had
just completed his junior year of high school, out of
giving Kentucky a verbal commitment. "We just decided
we had to have this kid," Green says. The Tennessee
players feel a similar urgency about
the upcoming season. "Everybody has their time to
shine,'' says Black. "Now is our
time."
—Seth Davis Top 25 | Rest of the Best
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