Tennessee Basketball’s four-game win streak ended on Saturday night with a road loss to Kentucky in Lexington. Fortunately for the Vols, though, the credit that the team earned during the winning stretch helped Tennessee stay buoyant enough not to fall too much after the Kentucky loss.
Tennessee has been the projected 5-seed in Joe Lunardi’s latest two bracketology reports, which came after UT’s Auburn win and Ole Miss win. It’s just been a matter of which region the Vols were slotted in. Tennessee didn’t move off the 5-seed line despite the loss to Kentucky.
In Lunardi’s latest round of projections for ESPN on Tuesday, Tennessee comes in as the 5-seed in the South Region. Lunardi has Tennessee with a projected first-round matchup against 12-seed Stephen F. Austin and a potential second-round matchup against either 4-seed Virginia or 13-seed UNC Wilmington. The games are slotted for Portland, OR. Other notable entries in Lunardi’s projected South Region include 1-seed UConn, 2-seed Houston, 3-seed Purdue, 6-seed BYU, and 11-seed Texas.
Tennessee is one of 10 SEC teams in Lunardi’s latest projection, including 3-seed Florida, 5-seed Alabama, 5-seed Vanderbilt, 6-seed Arkansas, 7-seed Kentucky, 8-seed Texas A&M, 8-seed Auburn, 10-seed Georgia, and 11-seed Texas. Georgia is one of the last four teams to skip the First Four round, while Texas is one of the last four teams to make the field overall.
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Tennessee spent a large portion of February on the 6-seed line. The Vols dropped to a season-low 7-seed projection following the first loss to Kentucky back in January, but rose back to the 6-seed following wins at Alabama and at Georgia the following week. Tennessee then rose again to the 5-seed slot after defeating Auburn, and has kept that position after a win over Ole Miss and a loss to Kentucky. Again, just with a difference of regions separating the slots.
The Vols are 16-7 on the season and 6-4 in conference play with a game against Mississippi State coming up this Wednesday night in Starkville, MS. The Vols have a good chance to improve their conference record over the next two weeks with unranked matchups against Mississippi State, LSU, Oklahoma, and Missouri coming up. The only two ranked games left on the Vols’ regular season schedule are both against Vanderbilt, with one game in February and another in March.
The biggest difference between now and the start of the conference slate is the improved play of Nate Ament. The freshman wing is putting up 25.4 points per game over his last five contests. He’s reached a career-high 29 points twice during that stretch, both coming in road games against Kentucky and Alabama. Ament hasn’t scored fewer than 17 points since Jan. 6, averaging 11.1 points per game in the six games before that.
Mississippi State will host Tennessee at 9:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday night in Starkville, MS. Stay tuned to Rocky Top Insider for live, on-site coverage of the game.
