Tennessee has college basketballs best defense. Its the best shot at March success

June 14, 2024

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Red. That’s the first thing Zakai Zeigler sees when he walks into the Tennessee film room two days before the Volunteers play Texas — his name in the top right-hand corner of the slide projected onto the big screen in bright red colors. Not an hour earlier, the Vols point guard had explained the misery of seeing your name in red, how he worked so hard to avoid it, and felt like he’d done a pretty good job tilting toward the other option, the better option, of a nice bright green highlight. Now here he is, shuffling to his seat for two hours of film, on the wrong side of the color spectrum. Zeigler lets out a big sigh and plops down, knowing what he’s in for.

Years ago, back when he was still at Texas, Rick Barnes wanted to find a way to drill down on the importance of individual defense. Like every other coach in the country, he showed his players clips, broke down what they did right and wrong. But he needed something to drive his point home. Make them understand their responsibility in the big picture. He charged his then-assistant Russell Springmann to devise a plan. It’s been tinkered with since, made fancier and splashier with color-coded graphics, and expanded to include more pinpoint analytics. The root remains the same: A player in the red has, essentially, given up too many points.

The color doesn’t come up a whole lot in Tennessee film sessions these days. The Volunteers are too busy making opponents see red to wind up in it themselves. The nation’s second-ranked team owns the best defense in the land, and the two are entirely related. A career-long believer in the idea that “defense travels,” Barnes has crafted a team that has carted its defense everywhere it goes.

The Volunteers do not merely boast the top defense in KenPom this season; they own the best defense since Pomeroy started analyzing the numbers in 1997. Per CBB Analytics, Tennessee sits in the 100th percentile of no less than seven defensive categories, and 90th or better in 11 more. Teams can’t score against the Vols (55.1 points per game) or shoot against them (39.6 effective field-goal percentage). Not inside (43.7 percent shooting on 2s) or outside (22.5 percent on 3s). They can’t pass the ball (9 assists per game allowed) and they can’t control it, either (16.4 turnovers per game forced). Only three teams have scored 70-plus points on Tennessee this year, and more to the point of the red and green: Only five players have scored 20 points or more on the Vols.

The exchange for such heavy concentration on defense can, of course, be an offense that is sometimes less than scintillating. For as good as their defensive numbers are, the Vols’ offense is pretty pedestrian: 36th percentile in 3-point percentage, 29th in pace, and nearly absent in fast-break points (8.2 points per game). It’s bitten them, most notably in an ugly home loss to a reeling Kentucky team when they mustered just 56 points, and this week when they followed up a statement-making home win against Texas, with a dud of a loss at Florida. The Gators, KenPom’s eighth-best defense, essentially gave Tennessee a heavy dose of its own medicine, allowing the Vols to shoot just 27 percent from the floor and 20 from the arc, perfectly content to grind out a 67-54 win.

That loss gave the Barnes-can’t-win-the-big-one crowd new life (he, along with Mark Few and Matt Painter, are card-carrying members of the club they’d all like to get kicked out of), and plenty went to social media to chirp their dismay. It’s not an unfair criticism. Though defense has long held as a predictor of national champion-caliber teams, offense matters, too. Of they last 10 title winners, all but upstart UConn in 2014 has boasted a KenPom offense rated in the top 10. The Huskies finished 39th. Tennessee is currently 41st. “Look, we’ve been ripped a few times,” Barnes says. “But I know this. We better be able to compete every night. We need it. We can’t go in thinking we’re going to score 80 points. Bottom line, I could tell you everything I think, but who knows what’s actually going to happen? You just need to be able to compete every night. Respect the game. Play the game the right way on both ends. Do what we practice, and see if it works. That’s all you can do.”

The chase for the impossible has long gnawed at Barnes. “He wants a game where the opponent scores zero points,” says senior Josiah-Jordan James. “He wants perfection.” It ate Barnes up to the point that he became a person he didn’t like very much for a while. He soul searched, pivoted and regrouped, but even the calmer, more at peace version of Barnes only flirts with satisfaction.

During a recent postgame film study, the Volunteers goals — holding their opponent to under 40 percent shooting, limiting them to less than seven 3-pointers, allowing less than 65 points, achieving at least seven sacks (three consecutive stops) and cataloging at least 35 deflections — all have a great big, beautiful green “yes” next to them. Yet for a good hour, Barnes harps on the Vols’ lazy start, how they allowed two easy buckets on the first two possessions. Never mind that Georgia never led after 6-4, that Tennessee won by 29 or that all but three players wound up in the green. “Not good enough,” Barnes says over and over again. It seems exhausting, persnickety even, but Barnes is hard-wired that way.

Rick Barnes relishes Tennessee’s defensive approach. The Vols are currently first in the country in efficiency. (Randy Sartin / USA Today)

A natural tinkerer who has conjured his own gadgets and doodads to use in practice, he is on a constant quest, peppering every conversation with either a query about how the Vols can get better, or a reminder that they need to improve. The word “relentless” comes up more than once, and an armchair psychologist might argue it’s because he’s never won a national title that Barnes can’t let up. Except Barnes was like this long before he was even in the national championship-hunt conversation. His is a hellbent desire — a need even — to ensure every thought, tweak and nuance has been considered, exploited and used to maximize his team’s potential.

Tennessee’s strength coach Garrett Medenwald, for instance, has been given near carte blanche to employ any and all tools, toys and equipment to make the Vols stronger and more agile. Managers now lug bendy poles everywhere Tennessee goes, and the players jump on force plates to measure their workload. Along with the rudimentary measurements of lateral leap performance, Medenwald spits out weekly assessments of isometric mid-thigh pull performance, a player’s resiliency score report, and a load comparison so that coaches can properly make an effective practice plan.

Perfecting defense always has dogged Barnes the most. As a young coach at George Mason, when you could actually live scout, he’d sit in the bleachers and watch John Thompson Jr. work. At Providence, he’d absorb the conversations in the league meetings, trying to learn by osmosis the Big East’s trademark ferocity.

In the offseason he’d travel the country and visit with older coaches, stopping in to pick Hugh Durham’s brain, or see what Wimp Sanderson had to say. He’d frequently make the trek to Bloomington, Ind., for Bob Knight’s one-man clinic, and still clings to Knight’s philosophy that the mental to the physical in the game of basketball is four to one. He figures every drill he runs is some kind of a derivative of Henry Iba’s practice work, since most of his mentors stem from Iba’s tree.

Somewhere along the way Barnes learned to accept the fact that he didn’t have all of the answers, and assigned an assistant to help strengthen the defense he valued so much. Larry Shyatt did it first, back when Barnes was head coach at Providence. At Tennessee, Mike Schwartz held the commands until he was named head coach at East Carolina. Now Justin Gainey, who made a career as a stealthy point guard at NC State under equally defensive-minded Herb Sendek, is in charge. Gainey spent last year on the Tennessee staff and read the tea leaves, guessing Schwarz might get his own gig soon. He spent time picking Schwartz’s brain, getting a feel for Barnes’ philosophy and looking for ways he could add to it, so that when he slid into the associate head coach chair, he was ready.

There is not a ton of complexity to the Vols’ defense. It’s not some quirky John Chaney matchup zone that trips people up with its unfamiliarity. They work hard on their defensive stance and closeouts. Boxouts are non-negotiable. They study film — a lot of it, so much so that a player or two has been known to doze off in the big cozy leather recliners, their catnap them requiring them to stand for the duration of the session. Considering Barnes termed two hours “short,” that could be a lot of standing.

In film, there are conversations about offensive schemes, but the bulk is on defense, breaking down plays and tendencies to eliminate surprises but mostly going over, again and again, mistakes and ways to get better. Essentially it all boils down to a gladiator battle, you versus your man. Who’s going to win? Help is there, but in an ideal world a Vol doesn’t need it. “If you become reliant on your help, then you’re going to give things up,” says Gainey. “You’re going to constantly be in rotation, and putting two on the ball. When you do that, you compromise your defense. If you can stay squared up with your man and contain him, within that one-foot block on each side, you’ve done your job.”

Well, sort of. The system Springmann devised all of those years ago is a bit devious. There are nuances to just how points are allocated. Give up a direct drive to the basket, and those two are all yours. Give up a drive to the basket that forces a rotation and allows for an open 3, you’re getting at least 1 1/2 of those points. “It’s about individual accountability,” Springmann says. “You can show guys scoreboards, and we’ve got all of this data and analytics, but it’s really about did you do your job? That’s what it’s always been about with Coach. It’s not the school grading system, where nine out of 10 is pretty good. It’s did you do your job every time, every play and every day?”

Tennessee is especially good at recovering for mistakes — fix-it plays, the Vols call them — but to Barnes, and thereby to the Vols, one mistake leaves the entire defense potentially exposed. To underscore the point, the points assigned aren’t merely a total; they’re broken down to points per 40 minutes. So a player who gives up just three points but plays only nine minutes will see his name in the red, too. “The problem with coaches is, we don’t want anybody to score,” Barnes admits. “So our goal is, they’re going to score, but we want it done on our terms. You can’t be perfect, as much as you may search for it. But you gotta go after it. You gotta go after perfection and make sure whatever they get on us, they’re going to earn it.”

No one would have accused Santiago Vescovi of being an elite defender four years ago. Not even Vescovi. Born in Uruguay and brought up through the NBA Global Academy program, he found his niche as a 3-point shooter who could get by defensively in European ball, where both the pace of play and the players were slower. He came to Knoxville and soon felt the wind of the frequent blow-bys from his teammates. “The mind was there. I could think through it,” he says. “But my legs wouldn’t respond the way I wanted them to.” It’s that first part — the mind — that the Tennessee staff says makes all the difference.

Santiago Vescovi and the rest of the Vols are expected to be able to take their man on without help. (Randy Sartin / USA Today)

High school ball, and certainly grassroots ball, is not exactly the Mall of America for coaches shopping for elite defenders. Players who excel defensively at a young age often do because it’s their calling card — like Zeigler, who at 5-9, wasn’t going to earn many D1 looks unless he turned into a pitbull on the ball. To a player, the Vols admit that defense was something they did more than something they played before coming to Knoxville. “I wasn’t really thinking about defense too much,” Uros Plavsic says, summing up the general attitude of the college basketball recruit.

The Volunteers coaches improvise on the recruiting trail. They look for that which can’t be taught — effort, competitiveness, and a want to play hard — and turn that into defense. Vescovi, for example, now spends nearly every game on the opponent’s best perimeter defender, and is, according to Gainey, “special,” a player who is a master at the fix-it plays by always making the right rotation or jumping in the lane to take a charge.

That comes from time served. Medenwald’s summer boot camp and training sessions have made Vescovi’s once uncooperative legs stronger and quicker. He’s constantly watching film, rehashing mistakes to figure out where to get better. But the real motivator is the same for every player in a Tennessee uniform: “Playing defense is the first and only way you’re going to get on the court,” James says. “One play you don’t box out or go to the glass, he’s coming to get you. A few plays you get scored on he has a very short leash when it comes to the must-haves, to guard your yard and rebound.”

The Vols have been tantalizing before under Barnes. In 2018-19, with Grant Williams and Admiral Schofield and an offensively-gifted team, Tennessee climbed to its second No. 1 ranking in program history, winning 29 regular-season games to earn a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. They were bounced by Purdue in an epic Sweet 16 overtime game. And just last season, riding a stifling defense, they won 12 of their final 13 games, taking them all the way to the SEC tournament title. Michigan ousted Tennessee in the second round.

But this is a weird year. Aside from the inevitability of Purdue’s Zach Edey, nothing seems certain. Tennessee is the third team in a row to assume the No. 2 spot only to promptly lose within a week of the ranking. Kansas lost to TCU, the beginning of a three-game skid, and Alabama got housed by Oklahoma. Love or hate Tennessee’s defensive approach, it has only failed them four times this season. “Not everybody can run off screens and get an open shot like Santi,” Gainey says. “Not everybody can catch a lob like Julian (Phillips) or Uros. But everyone can guard. That’s something you can count on. That’s something we know we can count on.”

Write that in red.

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic: Photos: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)

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