An ugly night is always an opportunity for Coach Barnes.
Tennessee’s unblemished record is no more. Florida took the Volunteers to the woodshed on Tuesday night in Gainesville, dominating from the opening tip. It took Tennessee several minutes to even put a point on the board, and that only came from Felix Okpara drawing a foul and heading to the free throw stripe.
Tennessee was ice cold from the floor, particularly from the three-point line. It’s not like the looks that they were getting weren’t good ones, they just simply weren’t falling. Chaz Lanier couldn’t buy one, Igor Milicic was left open several times, along with Zakai Zeigler — nothing doing.
Even more surprising than that was Florida being more physical all night long. The Gators beat Tennessee up in the paint and on the boards, winning the effort and size battles time and time again. That doesn’t happen very often to a Rick Barnes coached team.
Tennessee is now 14-1 on the year after the loss. The problem is, the loss was a convincing one. Where does Rick Barnes go from here? He sees an opportunity.
“Well, you know, we have a routine that we do,” Barnes said after the game. “We’ll go back and we’ll scrub this out and talk about the things that you want to do.
“(Florida) is a team that scores a lot of points. And as bad as we were on offense, I mean, I’m not sure what they were averaging. I know they’re way up there, the numbers. Defensively, take away the offensive rebound, we probably defended well enough to win a game and we could have been just somewhat ept on offense.”
Florida Tennessee’d Tennessee. Those that know this team know what that statement means. The Gators were the tougher team by a mile on Tuesday night, shockingly winning the rebounding battle by 17. You just never see that from this program. The lack of shooting is one thing, but Tennessee has proven they can win ugly. Losing the rebounding battle by nearly 20? That’s tough to overcome.
“When we got down— shot selection, allowed them to get out and transition offensive rebounds, those type things,” Barnes continued. “And we got behind. And then I just, again, we weren’t following what we needed to do coming out of timeouts.
“And it’s good for all of us. We talk about it. We never, again, I’m not even sure at any point in time when we started a season we thought we’d be (where we are) right now. I’m proud of this team. I thank the Good Lord that they’re our guys. And again, I love our guys, and am blessed to have this opportunity to coach them and we’ll learn from this.”
We’ve seen offensive droughts plenty in the Rick Barnes era, but Tuesday night was really the first time all year that we’ve seen it from this group. What we haven’t seen much is Tennessee being completely dominated on the boards. Florida just looked bigger, longer and more athletic in the front court. With Tennessee’s limited options following the injury to JP Estrella, that’s a legitimate concern going forward.
Still though, Tennessee can overcome that with elite guard play. They just didn’t get that against Florida in a very tough environment.
Big picture, the Volunteers will be just fine. Barnes ever so quietly might not even hate this, viewing it as a chance to get after his guys a bit on the practice floor. Riding high on a 14-game winning streak is one thing, getting beat by 30 will bring you down to earth pretty quickly.
“We’ve been here before, believe me, been beat worse than this,” Barnes said. “And we’ll will learn from it.”