After limping to the finish line with a blowout loss at the Kentucky Wildcats and a shocking loss at home to the Georgia Bulldogs, the second-worst team in the SEC, to close out the season, both Kim Caldwell and the Tennessee Lady Vols entered the SEC Tournament with something to prove. They both delivered as well.
UT, the No. 9 seed with an 8-8 regular season league record, beat the No. 16 seed Texas A&M Aggies 77-37 to open the event in Greenville, S.C., Wednesday. Ranked No. 18 in the AP Poll and No. 17 in the Coaches Poll, there should have been no surprise in them beating the worst team in the league who went 3-13 in regular season conference play.
However, after losing at home to the Dawgs Sunday and facing this team on a neutral court in South Carolina, anything was possible. As a result, the win itself was impressive enough. Winning by 40, though, disproved a very real concern about the Lady Vols: They haven’t hit a wall yet.
Heading into last week, the team was giving off a vibe of getting tired with all this tempo it ran. That wasn’t the case Wednesday. They only shot 8-of-22 from three but forced 32 turnovers and were mostly dominant in transition. Oh, and they also had 17 offensive rebounds, so the energy was there.
That was a better performance than their 91-78 win over A&M in College Station back in January, when they were still undefeated, which should prove they haven’t lost it yet. Key was getting Talaysia Cooper healthy after she left the Georgia game. Cooper had 19 points, eight rebounds and three steals, all off the bench, which leads to our next take.
Perhaps it was because she was injured, but moving Cooper to the bench was part of an overall lineup change Caldwell did that proved she can adjust. To this point, you could be concerned that Caldwell was just a coach who ran a system and was going to get better players to run it but didn’t coach game to game and play to play.
Well, in this one, she did just that, as she had Cooper, Samara Spencer and Ruby Whitehorn, three starters all year, all come off the bench. It worked. Spencer had 10 points. The two regular starters who stayed in there, Zee Spearman and Jewel Spear, each had 11 points.
Simply put, Caldwell proved she can adjust while the Lady Vols proved they are still fresh. Maybe the two were connected. Knowing UT was going to the NCAA Tournament and the selection committee has a bad habit of not using conference tournaments for seeding at all, it’s possible she made this move just to further rest their players and stumbled into an easy win.
Still, this was a big moment for the program and the head coach, and the switch worked. Keeping things fresh and unpredictable, particularly with the controlled chaos that this team runs, could be a huge benefit for them to make a run in March Madness, provided they still have the energy.
With the win, the Lady Vols improve to 22-8 on the year. They will face the No. 8 seed Vanderbilt Commodores at 11 a.m. ET on SEC Network Thursday, and the winner of that game will face the top-seeded South Carolina Gamecocks Friday. A&M, meanwhile, finishes its season 10-19 under third-year head coach Joni Taylor.
