DALLAS — The NCAA tournament is as unforgiving as it is fascinating, as impossible to predict as it is guaranteed to entertain.
And this one no longer includes the Tennessee Volunteers. They’ve been sent home under the cruelest of circ*mstances. The South Region’s No. 3 seed went down to No. 11 seed Loyola of Chicago, 63-62 on Saturday in American Airlines Arena, after all the Vols did to charge back from a 10-point deficit in the final moments. It was Tennessee’s Grant Williams giving his team a one-point lead with a basket plus the foul and free throw with 20.1 seconds left, then Loyola’s Clayton Custer getting a fadeaway jumper to bounce in off a friendly rim with 3.6 seconds left, then Tennessee’s Jordan Bone missing a three-point heave at the buzzer. It was hugging and screaming on one side and silence and empty stares on the other.
More:Vols basketball upset by Loyola Chicago in NCAA Tournament
"You know, they're crushed," Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said of his players, who were speaking through tears and tissues in the losing locker room as he spoke at a press conference. "We all are. And I told them, I said, 'Hey, one, I'm glad it hurts a little bit because I've had some teams sometimes that you wondered if it hurt deep enough.'"
There was no wondering with this team.
"Tough loss," UT's Admiral Schofield said, finding his voice after mumbling brief answers at first. "Big shot. And for us, it doesn't define who we are. It doesn't define our season. We did a lot of great things this year, but it's motivation. It's something we needed to happen ... We got a little taste of what it's like to be here, and if we want to go further, we've got to work a little harder."
But that's for later. Saturday was the latest illustration of how fast a special season can go poof, how bitter the ending can be for a special team that will never be exactly the same team again. Barnes has done a tremendous job of reviving this program in his third season. But it ends in grave disappointment.
There’s no way around that, because this team could have stayed around a lot longer than it did. It could have ended its season in a different Texas city, San Antonio, site of the Final Four. No question about it. You think the Vols couldn’t have beaten Cincinnati or Nevada next week in Atlanta, and Kentucky or whoever they might have faced in the game after that? Of course they could have.
And to add to that in the exact same breath, Saturday’s result was not some Earth-shaking upset. This was not Maryland-Baltimore County over Virginia. The Vols got an SEC co-championship and a No. 3 seed in the tourney because they play excellent team basketball on both ends and pose matchup problems for most opponents with forwards Williams (12 points) and Schofield (14).
Loyola, which won at Florida in this dream season of its own, also plays excellent team basketball. The Vols are not overwhelmingly talented and do not know exactly what they will get from their guards on a nightly basis. Throw in the fact that starting UT center Kyle Alexander — the shot-erasing presence who anchors this defense — was a late scratch because of a bone bruise on his hip, and you had the conditions for a mild upset.
"We can't replace him, what he does at the rim for us," Barnes said of Alexander. "We can't. And I'm not taking anything away from Loyola, they won the game."
Schofield was on fire with 11 points right away, his steal and dunk making it 15-6 Vols and forcing Loyola coach Porter Moser to call a timeout before the first TV timeout. But the Vols went cold. Schofield picked up two fouls, the second going over the back because Bone (13 points) blew a fast-break layup. And Loyola aptly adjusted to Tennessee’s ball pressure and insistence on chasing the Ramblers off the three-point line.
"They run you off that line," Moser said of the Vols. "And we talked about not settling."
Loyola outscored Tennessee 23-10 in the final 15 minutes of the first half to take a 29-25 lead at the break. The Vols were too stagnant on too many offensive possessions, one of them ending with Lamonte Turner launching a no-chancer from 25 feet as the shot clock expired, then being pulled and chewed out by Barnes.
"We took bad shots," Barnes said.
Quite simply, the Ramblers were more difficult for the Vols to guard than the other way around. When the Ramblers took a long Turner miss the other way for a fast-break layup to go up 10 with 4 minutes left, you knew this thing was pretty much over for Tennessee. Except it wasn’t.
Schofield hit a three for his first points since the early binge, starting UT on an 11-3 run. He missed a three that would have put his team up with a minute left, and then the Vols got it back again, down 61-59, and Williams did the work that set up the final sequence. And then one friendly rim sent the Vols home in agony.
“Glory to God on that one,” Custer said, and though 98-year-old team chaplain Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt was no doubt praying hard for it, Barnes summed the moment up best in the final words of his press conference: "That's basketball."
The Vols will only lose one player, senior reserve guard James Daniel, and though Barnes needs to find an impact backcourt player to add, next season’s team should be a preseason top-15 pick and one of the favorites in the SEC. That will be of little consolation as the Vols watch the rest of a tournament that can reduce months of work to rubble in a couple of hours.
Contact Joe Rexrode at jrexrode@tennessean.com and follow him on Twitter @joerexrode.
