A group of rowdy Illinois students greeted the Tennessee Volunteers men’s basketball team Friday night outside their team dinner in Champaign, Ill., with some jeers. Among them, that their No. 1 ranking in the AP poll wouldn’t last more than a week. 

It was only a teaser for the type of environment the Volunteers walked into Saturday—one of college basketball’s most raucous arenas, against a team with a pair of potential lottery picks, would teach us a lot about where Tennessee truly stood among the sport’s elite. 

A day later, the Vols will catch a charter flight back to Knoxville, Tenn., having answered a lot of those questions … and locked up at least one more week atop the poll in the process. 

If you were scripting out a stress test for a top-tier team, it’d look something like the 40 minutes the Vols battled through Saturday evening. The Illinois Fighting Illini scored the game’s first eight points, adding more fuel to an already combustible Illini crowd. Starting center Felix Okpara was rendered largely unplayable thanks to Illinois’s floor-spacing 5-man, Tomislav Ivisic. Star guards Zakai Zeigler and Chaz Lanier got saddled to the bench with foul trouble, with their point guard and leader in Zeigler sitting nearly 14 straight minutes after picking up his fourth less than two minutes into the second half. Illinois shot 36 free throws. 

None of it was enough to break Tennessee. 

“They’re no joke,” Illinois coach Brad Underwood said postgame. 

Early, it was Lanier who ignited the Vols’ offense to bounce back from the 8–0 Illini start. He scored 15 in the first half and could’ve had more had he not missed four free throws in the opening 20 minutes. Tennessee made just three field goals in the first 13 minutes, almost assuredly a recipe for disaster on the road, but kept hanging around. 

In the second, the showstopper was senior guard Jordan Gainey, one of Tennessee’s key backcourt reserves and the son of Vols top assistant Justin Gainey. Jordan Gainey hadn’t topped 16 points in a game all season; he scored 18 in the second half Saturday. Even before his buzzer-beating layup that silenced a crowd that was prepping for a potential court storm, Gainey made play after play that kept the Vols pacing. Tennessee trailed by six twice in the second half, and each time it didn’t take long for Gainey to answer … including a tying three with just under nine minutes to play that served as a key silencer. 

Gainey embodied what was rather remarkable team-wide poise, aided perhaps by the Vols’ extensive experience. Six of Tennessee’s seven players who played at least 10 minutes are in at least their fourth year in college. Some of that experience was spent at mid-majors like North Florida, Charlotte and Hofstra, but Tennessee certainly didn’t look like a team playing its first close game of the season in those closing minutes. Instead, the Vols took advantage of shoddy late-game execution by the Illini, including a thrown-away inbounds pass with under two minutes to go in a tie game that turned into a transition bucket for Igor Milicic. 

That flowed into the final possession. Illini freshman sensation Kasparas Jakucionis stepped to the free throw line with under six seconds to play with a chance to give Illinois the lead. He split the pair, missing the first before swishing the second. Illinois didn’t take a timeout to set its defense, which allowed Tennessee to get Gainey flowing downhill with Jakucionis on his heels. Credit Gainey for a creative scooped-in finish, but there was little resistance in him getting to the rim in the first place in a short-clock situation.

“I just saw my defender keep backing up, he just kept backing up and he was dead in the water,” Gainey said. 

Afterward, Underwood shouldered the blame, saying he should have called the timeout to better prepare his defense. In those six seconds, a chance for one of Illinois’s best wins under Underwood evaporated, instead giving the Vols yet another early feather in their caps. 

Escaping Champaign with a win means the Vols will almost assuredly enter SEC play in the new year at 13–0, likely still at No. 1 in the polls. Rick Barnes has been doing this for decades (even referencing that the play they ran for that buzzer-beating bucket is something he lifted from a high school coach in 1980), but this so far has been as fine a coaching job as he has ever put on. To lose not just first-round NBA pick Dalton Knecht but four total starters and have this new group of transfers clicking this fast? If there’s a national coach of the year award to be given out in December, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone more deserving than Barnes. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee has been to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament eight times since 2000, but is still without a Final Four appearance in program history. Saturday’s showing should give all those on Rocky Top renewed hope that this group might just have what it takes to finally break through. 

Elite nonconference showdowns like this are designed to find the pressure points, poke the holes, uncover the flaws. Tennessee is by no means flawless, but coming out of the storm victorious is as strong a statement as could be made that the Vols are here to stay atop the sport.


This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tennessee Men’s Hoops Survives Illinois Test to Back Up Top Ranking.