Lady Vols basketball is in the midst of a three-game losing streak and is coming off possibly the worst loss yet, a defeat to a struggling Texas A&M team at home.
After beginning the season with expectations of earning a right to host as a 4-seed or better in the NCAA Tournament, that has seemingly gone out the window. Now, ESPN’s latest bracketology has Tennessee as a projected 6-seed in the bracket.
ESPN has the Lady Vols opening the event against 11-seed Rice. The winner would play the winner between 3-seed TCU and 14-seed Idaho. Those opening two rounds would both be played in Fort Worth at the home court of the Horned Frogs.
If Tennessee can earn its way back to the Sweet 16 for the second-straight year under Kim Caldwell, the Lady Vols would likely play 2-seed Vanderbilt. Other top seeds on the path to a potential Final Four would be 1-seed UCLA and 4-seed Kentucky.
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There isn’t much time for the Lady Vols to turn things around. Next, Tennessee will play at No. 11 Oklahoma on Sunday. Then, it’s a road game at No. 7 LSU and home game against No. 5 Vanderbilt to finish the year. The ensuing SEC Tournament would be the final chance to improve the resume before the NCAA Tournament.
“Yeah, we have limited practice time left,” Caldwell said after losing to Texas A&M. “We have to have a day off. We’ll have another one-day prep going into Oklahoma. We’ll do a lot of it with film, we’ll do a lot of it with breakdown. I think there was a point in time in the year where we were pretty solid defensively, and that was kind of what we hung our hat on, was our half-court defense, and we just need to find a way to get back to that.”
The matchup with the Sooners in Norman on Sunday is set for 2 p.m. ET. The game will air on ESPN.
