Yes, a loose and confident Kentucky basketball can beat Tennessee a third time this season
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Preview: Kentucky vs. Tennessee in NCAA Tournament
Click below to read more coverage from the Lexington Herald-Leader and Kentucky.com ahead of Kentucky’s men’s NCAA Tournament game against Tennessee in Indianapolis on Friday.
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Can Kentucky basketball beat Tennessee on Friday night at Lucas Oil Stadium? Of course it can. The Wildcats have beaten the Volunteers twice already. Once in Knoxville. Once in Lexington. It’s only the second time that UK has completed the regular season sweep since Rick Barnes became the UT coach. This Kentucky team knows it can beat this Tennessee team.
Will Kentucky beat Tennessee on Friday in their NCAA Tournament Midwest Regional semifinal? That’s the bigger question. The better question. Consensus says the Cats will not. Tennessee is the higher seed. It owned a better SEC record. It’s a 4.5-point favorite? It’s tough to beat a good team three times in the same season.
Tough, but not impossible. And at least in the open locker room Thursday, Mark Pope’s Cats were loose — “I think we’re just enjoying each other a lot right now,” said Collin Chandler — and confident and dismissive that a third meeting with Tennessee would be automatically different.
“We have to do the same thing we did to them the last two times,” Otega Oweh said. “We’ve got to be physical and focus on us.”
“Obviously, Tennessee is a really good team. They have really good players,” said freshman Trent Noah. “I just think it’s doing what we do, playing our game.”
After all, the NCAA Tournament is about matchups. So everybody says. Alabama beat Kentucky three times this season. Maybe the Vols have a hard time matching up against the Cats. Or maybe the Cats have an easier time matching up against the Vols. Maybe one team is in the collective head space of the other team. Maybe not.
Maybe flukes were involved. After all, Kentucky made 12 of 24 shots from 3-point range in both games against Tennessee. Not combined. In each game — the 78-73 win in Knoxville; the 75-64 victory in Lexington. If that’s not weird enough: Kentucky shot 50 percent overall in each game.
In Knoxville, Tennessee took 45 shots from 3-point range. That’s the second-most attempts in UT history, the most under Barnes. It made 11. Not good. The Vols weren’t much better in Lexington. They attempted 18 shots from beyond the arc at Rupp. They made three.
“We didn’t play like ourselves the first two times we played them,” Vols point guard Zakai Zeigler, who was 1-of-11 from 3 in that first game, said Thursday.
The misses in Lexington didn’t irk Barnes as much as his team’s play down the stretch. Tennessee led 60-58 with 4:49 remaining. It was outscored 17-4 the rest of the way. At his postgame press conference, there was frustration in the voice of the Vols’ coach.
“Way too many defensive breakdowns on our part,” said the coach. “Give Kentucky credit. We had too many defensive breakdowns on things that you can’t do there at the end of the game, and then I thought offensively we had a few guys that got too emotional, didn’t make good decisions on the offensive end.”
Said Tennessee’s Cade Phillips on Thursday, “We felt like our heads were other places.”
Thursday, Barnes said this: “They got it done and we didn’t.”
Tennessee’s 3-point accuracy has improved this tournament. The Vols were a combined 21-of-50 from 3-point range in wins over Wofford and UCLA. Star guard Chaz Lanier missed all seven of his 3-point attempts against UK at Rupp. He was 4-of-5 from 3 against UCLA at Rupp last Saturday. Through two NCAA games, he’s scored 49 points.
Barnes could be the wild card. He’s a Hall of Fame-worthy coach. He’s 32-28 in the NCAA Tournament. He has been to one Final Four, 2003 while at Texas. He’s 4-4 in Sweet 16 games, including 1-2 at Tennessee. Both were losses to lower-seeded teams — as a No. 2 to No. 3 Purdue in 2019 and as a No. 4 to No. 9 FAU in 2023. Last season, No. 2 seed Tennessee lost to No. seed 1 Purdue in the Elite Eight.
Mark Pope has never been this far, not as a coach. His first NCAA Tournament win came last Friday. His second came two days later. His third win, and third win against Tennessee, could come Friday.
Something tells me, he and his team will get the three-peat done.
This story was originally published March 27, 2025 at 3:36 PM.
