Lady Vols basketball dropped two more spots in the Associated Press poll Monday after losing to Vanderbilt in the SEC tournament.
Tennessee (22-9) is ranked No. 20 in the AP Top 25 after losing to its in-state rival twice in the same season for the first time in program history. The Lady Vols started the SEC tournament with a 40-point win over Texas A&M before falling to the Commodores in the second round.
Tennessee will find out its placement in the 2025 NCAA tournament bracket after playing itself out of hosting privileges. The Lady Vols were once a projected No. 3 seed, but they’ve lost three of their last four games since the in-season reveal of top 16 seeds on Feb. 27.
The Lady Vols’ four-game winning streak was brought to an abrupt halt when they got blown out on the road by Kentucky. They beat Auburn, Ole Miss, Alabama and Florida going into their final ranked matchup of the year in Lexington, but they crumbled on the road, missing an opportunity to improve their NCAA Tournament seeding. They worsened their March Madness positioning with a loss to Georgia.
Alabama is Tennessee’s lone ranked win in SEC play – it lost all its other ranked matchups, which included Oklahoma, Texas, South Carolina, Kentucky and LSU twice. Eight of the Lady Vols’ losses were by single digits. The 24-point loss to the Wildcats was the only loss by more than eight points.
Tennessee reentered the top 15 after its signature win over UConn on Feb. 6. It was Caldwell’s debut in the storied rivalry and Tennessee’s first win against the Huskies since 2007.
The Lady Vols started Caldwell’s first season going 13-0 before suffering their first loss, which was their best start to a season since going 15-0 in 2017-18. Their 7-0 start got them back in the rankings on Dec. 9 with wins over Florida State and then-No. 20 Iowa.
Tennessee has been ranked in the polls for the last 14 weeks, restarting its streak in the polls after being unranked for more than a year. In the entire history of the AP Top 25, Tennessee has spent 792 of 883 weeks ranked.
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Before getting ranked this season, the last time the Lady Vols had been ranked in the AP Top 25 was Week 4 of the 2023-24 season, which was released Nov. 27, 2023. Tennessee had only been ranked for 10 of the previous 45 weeks of the AP Top 25 since being ranked the entire 2021-22 season.
The Lady Vols first climbed into the top 15 on Dec. 23 after winning three games away from Knoxville. Tennessee won its first true road game against Memphis and then won both its games at the West Palm Beach Classic against Richmond and Tulsa in a four-day span.
Cora Hall covers University of Tennessee women’s athletics. Email her at cora.hall@knoxnews.com and follow her on X @corahalll. If you enjoy Cora’s coverage, consider a digital subscription that allows you to access all of it.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Updating Tennessee Lady Vols rankings in college basketball polls
