With 32 seconds to play on Sunday, Tennessee freshman guard Jaida Civil completed a putback to pull the Lady Vols to within three, the first time in more than five minutes they had been within one possession against Oklahoma.
Tennessee entered the contest on a three-game losing skid. ESPN’s “College Gameday” featured one of the program’s former players excoriating the team’s makeup on national television.
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Thanks to Civil’s play, Tennessee finally showed some life. But as fast as that hope arrived, it evaporated in the form of a flagrant foul on Zee Spearman. Two shots and possession for the Sooners, which meant it was all but another certain defeat for the Volunteers. The 100-93 loss completed their worst stretch in program history, with seven defeats in nine games.
Even on a day when the Lady Vols (16-10 overall, 8-6 SEC) had played together and played hard in the absence of its second-leading scorer, they suffered from just enough mental mistakes — which included 32 personal fouls, a technical for overzealously celebrating a 3-pointer, and Spearman’s flagrant — to undo them yet again.
“We’ve had an incredibly tough stretch,” coach Kim Caldwell said afterward. “You just (have to) be honest with your team, and they can handle it or they can not. And sometimes the honesty is not good and sometimes the honesty is good.”
As Caldwell evaluates her team in the moment, the entire program could use an honest look in the mirror.
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Tennessee used to be the team that was tougher, more disciplined and better at execution than almost every opponent. Knoxville, where Pat Summitt won eight national championships, was the national standard through the late 1980s, ’90s and 2000s.
But the Lady Vols haven’t won a title since 2008. They haven’t won an SEC title in more than a decade or even advanced to an Elite Eight since 2016. They’re in the news these days for drama, because Caldwell is calling them out or former players are criticizing her, or a senior leader didn’t make a road trip because she failed to “meet program standards.”
They have a style of play that is too gimmicky for the SEC and a roster that is destined to be ravaged by the transfer portal.
“This Tennessee team, it doesn’t look like they believe in the system,” ESPN analyst and former player Andraya Carter said before Sunday’s loss. “Is the team going to budge, or is the system going to budge? Because if you’re a coach, you are required to figure out a system that fits your players. There’s no amount of NIL money that can buy buy-in.”
Caldwell was supposed to herald the start of a new chapter in Tennessee. Clinging to the Summitt coaching tree wasn’t yielding the desired fruit for the program. The Lady Vols weren’t winning and looked stuck in the past. Caldwell came in fresh, with only one year of Division I coaching experience. But she had a novel style of play and a vision to move Tennessee forward, even if it looked different than the Summitt way.
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Instead, Caldwell has been no more successful than Holly Warlick or Kellie Harper before her. What the Volunteers have learned is that without Summitt, the only thing special about this program is its history. They are no longer a national powerhouse. They’re not even the best team in their state.
There has yet to be a DI program in the modern era to maintain success after the retirement of a coaching legend. Stanford missed the tournament after Tara VanDerveer’s departure in 2024 and will likely do so again. Notre Dame has stalled in the Sweet 16 since Muffet McGraw left, as has Baylor after Kim Mulkey moved to LSU. Tennessee is in uncharted territory. Despite its self-perception as a power in women’s basketball, the market revealed last offseason that the Tennessee head coaching position was no longer a prestige job — because Tennessee was no longer a prestige program.
A perfunctory NCAA Tournament appearance is the likely endgame of the 2025-26 season. And it’s unclear what Tennessee can even do about it. The Lady Vols are chasing ghosts.
They have to retain Caldwell, despite an uninspiring basketball product and public comments that haven’t exactly earned her much goodwill from the alumnae. She’ll likely stay because she was the best coach who wanted to take this job, and it’s better to keep building than restart the clock.
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It wasn’t supposed to be this bad this season. Caldwell’s first season in 2024-25 had some meaningful highs including a 13-game winning streak to start the year and an upset win over UConn, the Huskies’ most recent defeat.
But that roster is mostly gone, and the players Caldwell hand-picked to fit her system haven’t produced as expected. A top-10 recruiting class and highly-touted transfer Janiah Barker (from UCLA) have quite possibly the worst body language of any team in the country. Tennessee’s season began with a fall-from-ahead loss to NC State, a team that is currently unranked. The Lady Vols faceplanted in their big nonconference tests against UCLA and Louisville, losing by 22 and 24, respectively.
Their highly-anticipated rematch with the Huskies turned into a 30-point loss, the largest defeat in the history of the rivalry. The following week, they set a program record for futility, losing by 43 points to South Carolina and prompting Caldwell to call out her team for having a “lot of quit.”
After thumping Missouri and former head coach Harper by 45 points — potentially the lone moment of catharsis in a spiraling season — Tennessee has now lost four in a row. Barker didn’t even make the trip to Norman, Okla., for not meeting program expectations.
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Because of culture or coaching issues or otherwise, there are plenty of holes in Tennessee’s system. The Lady Vols take a lot of 3s, but don’t make them at a particularly high rate. They’re 13th in true-shooting percentage in the SEC. With so much isolation and pull-up jump shooting, Tennessee doesn’t get to the line or rebound the ball very well. The Volunteers’ volatile offensive process also allows opponents to score more fast-break points even though their full-court pressure results in 22.8 points off turnovers in conference games. That isn’t enough to overcome the deficits elsewhere.
Two more ranked opponents (No. 7 LSU and No. 5 Vanderbilt) remain to close out the regular season, and the Lady Vols could fail to crack the 20-win threshold for the second time in the NCAA era, excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season.
The advantage of the transfer portal era is that coaches can quickly reshape a roster to fit their style of play. But a remade lineup has exacerbated Tennessee’s issues. Effort and endurance aren’t separators in the SEC the way they were at Caldwell’s previous stops. She needs to adjust her system or her recruiting practices, because the combination isn’t working.
Historically, this much losing has warranted changes at Tennessee. Warlick failed to get out of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament three years in a row and lost her job, even after two previous Elite Eights and three conference titles. Harper, who played under Summit before being hired as coach, didn’t win an SEC championship during her five years — the Kamilla Cardoso miracle in the 2024 SEC tournament looms large — and she topped out at the Sweet 16, ending her tenure.
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But Tennessee can’t behave that way anymore, cutting coaches with the expectation a line of candidates will be waiting outside Thompson-Boling Arena. It doesn’t have the cache to draw the top options in the coaching carousel. The best coaches in the country seem more interested in building up new programs rather than resuscitating once-proud institutions. Even Kara Lawson, the Duke coach and a champion with the Volunteers who cites Summitt as her foremost coaching inspiration, reportedly turned down the job before Caldwell was hired.
This is what Tennessee is, a middle of the pack SEC team. Perhaps reinvestment in facilities, an increased NIL fund or higher coaching salaries will make it a more attractive destination. More likely, if the program takes a step forward, it is because Caldwell figures out how to navigate the SEC or lands a star recruit, not unlike how Mikayla Blakes gave life to Vanderbilt.
The expectations for Tennessee can’t be what they were. The athletic department signaled as much when it hired Caldwell. Whatever she does can’t be judged against Summitt. It’s a different era in college basketball, and a different era in Knoxville. It’s her task to prove she can build a competitive DI program regardless of what preceded her.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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