Rick Barnes shares locker room message after SEC Tournament upset

The top seeded Tennessee Volunteers and Rick Barnes saw themselves go down to No. 9 Mississippi State in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals.

But fear not, there will be more Tennessee basketball this March. That’s essentially how Barnes pitched it to his team in the locker room following the upset.

Remember this feeling and use it. Typical stuff of championship caliber teams.

“Well, I told them, I said, Let’s just sit here and think about how we feel right now,” Barnes said. “Let’s just talk about it, sit here and marinate in how you feel right now. If you feel like this again, it’s over. I want you to not forget right now what you did. This time of year you want to give it your best.

“Shack used the term ‘underdog’. I don’t know if ‘underdog’ is the right term. You have to understand how hard it is to win this time of year. If you want to be a team that can play through three days and win a conference tournament, through six days and win a national championship, there’s got to be somewhat of a desperate mindset that every possession matters.”

However, Barnes conceded that’s not the type of basketball Tennessee played early on.

“But we didn’t play with that type of mentality today. Really the first 20 minutes, I haven’t seen that team all year, even including practice,” Barnes said. “I’m sitting there watching it like, Man, maybe it might be good to get this out of our system. We haven’t had one like this where we didn’t respond better. I thought we got impatient, lost our poise, fouling with six seconds on the shot clock, trying to steal the ball when giving up position.

“Like Shack said, offensively we have won games where we haven’t been good on offense, but our defense has kept it in it. Our defense did not help us at all today.”

As far as any worry from Barnes, he can’t worry about too far into the future. Only what’s in front of Tennessee.

“I talked about that, too,” Barnes said. “I’ve said I’ve had teams many years that I’ve been blessed to do this, playing well at the end of the year, didn’t do well in the NCAA tournament. I’ve had a couple teams that were limping a little bit, ended up having great runs.

“We are who we are right now. Like Jahmai said, like we talked back there, we’ve got a week or so to fix it and go back. Like he said, we do what we always do. We have a system that we believe in. We have to scrub it out, look at it. It will go back to a mindset. That’s what I spent a lot of time talking to our team about, our mindset. Where is it? Where was it? Why was it like this today? Was it preparation different? It was. We’re an experienced team.”