Lady Vols basketball is in the midst of a rough stretch, dropping four straight games. Up next, it doesn’t get any easier. Tennessee will play at No. 6 LSU on Thursday and at home against No. 5 Vanderbilt to round out the regular season on Sunday.
With little time to build up their NCAA Tournament resume, the Lady Vols have slipped in ESPN’s updated bracketology, which projects the full 68-team bracket. Tennessee is now projected as a 7-seed. This is the lowest mark of the year for UT, previously being slotted as high as a 3-seed.
In this projection, the Lady Vols are predicted to begin the tournament against 10-seed Virginia. The winner of that game would get the winner between 2-seed Michigan and 15-seed Western Illinois. Both of those first two rounds would be played in Ann Arbor on Michigan’s home floor.
If Tennessee can return to a second-straight Sweet 16, the Lady Vols would likely match up with either 3-seed TCU or 6-seed Alabama. Other top seeds on the path to a potential Final Four include 1-seed Texas, 4-seed Ohio State and 5-seed Ole Miss.
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Most recently, the Lady Vols lost 100-93 on the road at No. 11 Oklahoma. Tennessee fell short, but showed some positives during the loss.
“Yeah, that’s SEC, isn’t it?” Caldwell said after the game. “You’re gonna have patches where you look really good. You’re gonna have patches where you have a tough stretch. We’ve had an incredibly tough stretch. I think you just be honest with your team and they can handle it or not, and sometimes the honesty is not good, and sometimes the honesty is good. And tonight, honestly, our team was fun to coach. We definitely made some basketball errors, but the people that were on the floor played hard. They played together. Not a good third quarter for us, but again, we can make some adjustments from today’s game going forward and be okay.”
Tip-off against LSU on Thursday is set for 6 p.m. ET and will air on ESPN.
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