What Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said Monday at the Knoxville Quarterback Club

Tennessee Basketball coach Rick Barnes was the guest speaker at The Knoxville Quarterback Club on Monday, looking back at the Davidson scrimmage on Sunday and previewing the season ahead for the new-look Vols:

Opening Statement

“It’s good to be with you. What a great weekend it was for everybody. And a big weekend for us, a lot of recruits on campus. And it’s always great to talk about what we have here, for people to come in and see it and be a part of it is really special. And it helps in ways you can’t even imagine. And we always believed that if we can get guys on campus that we got a chance to get them. 

“And we also had a scrimmage against Davidson College yesterday. And last week was the first week that we’ve gone six out of seven days. And so it was a lot of work, a load for us last week, but I thought we handled it really well. And I guess I’ve scrimmaged David since probably 20-some years. And my Bob McKillop, my best friend, his son (Matt McKillop) now coaches the team. Very similar team and they do a lot of things that you need to play against early in the year, because they’re so well-coached, so detail oriented. 

“And it was a good day for us and a lot of good things happened. Some guys, we just wanted to see what it would be like. You’d be surprised, just a scrimmage like that, the nerves that show up on some of those guys, which is obviously good. Now we’ll have Indiana coming in here Sunday. And what’s good about that, they wanted to come in here, they wanted to come in and play in, they said in front of a big crowd. They wanted to play against the team that they knew that would play hard and they’re really excited about their team. I know our guys are looking forward to this weekend, but we’ve got a long day tomorrow in the film room and clean up a lot of things that we need to do. 

“We need some of our younger guys that are back (from) a year ago, who are going to get more minutes this year to really figure it out defensively. Probably more than anything, they’re still just (figuring out) the details. We lost two terrific defensive guys in Santi and Josiah, guys that really can clean it up when other guys make mistakes. We got a couple of them right now. An article came out a couple weeks ago where they said we had three of the best defensive players in the country and certainly, ‘Z’ (Zakai Zeigler) Jahmai (Mashack) and Felix (Okpara), but I told Felix the other day, you can block shots, but if you block three shots but you don’t get out on the perimeter guard to 3-point line, it’s not going to work out the way we need to work out. And he was really good active yesterday. And really as the game went on, he got better and better and gives us something that we haven’t had in a long time. 

“But we’re excited. We played 11 people yesterday and we haven’t always done that in our scrimmages. And they all had good moments at times and some of them had some not so good moments. But we’re excited and it’s right around the corner and we’re going to see what we got. But we are excited about this group. They’ve worked hard, they like each other and that’s always a good thing. And it’s just a matter of, I always say it and I’ll say it forever, we just got to get better every day. And that’s what will be our goal this week, to be happy next week once we open we go against Indiana. It will be a totally different game. They’re really big, strong. Going to throw it inside hard. Where Davidson is a team that, if you give them a chance, they’d shoot 40 threes. And we didn’t give them that opportunity yesterday. Again, good weekend for us all the way around.” 

If he has made personnel decisions and set a rotation for this season’s Tennessee Basketball team

“No, I always tell (the players) it’s that film going to decide where they play or if  they play. We go over there, go in the film room, and we spend a lot of time in there and (do) a lot of coaching in that room. But we do think we have versatility. We had all different kind of makeshift lineups out there yesterday, anywhere from, I mean literally four guards to where we had Cade Phillips, Igor (Milicic) and JP (Estrella) or Felix (Okpara) on the court at one time. So we can play a lot of different ways with this group and we’re just trying to figure out the combinations that work and the ones that don’t.”

If there are any rule changes in college basketball this season 

“No, this is not a rule change here. So nothing is different really than last year. And I thought last year the biggest thing was they had pretty much told players that the secondary defender comes over, 99.9% they’re going to call a block. So they’re trying to clean up that hard collision with the secondary defender coming over but that’s not really any rule change this year.”

What SEC teams will be the biggest challenges for Tennessee this season

“Well I think they’re all going to be because right now, we just got back from SEC Media Day, and they’re projecting nine, 10 teams to go to the NCAA Tournament. They think it’s the best the league has ever been. And I think they’re all tough. I don’t take any of them for granted. And this year our three common opponent that we’ll play twice— with Oklahoma and Texas coming into the league — we used to play, every year, six games between Kentucky, Vanderbilt and South Carolina. The way the new format is when we have two of those, now we got Kentucky and Vanderbilt this year, Florida will be our one that will play twice and we play everybody else. We got our SEC schedule, it’s tough because I think five of our last eight games on the road and by that time of the year, you have to believe that teams have either gotten pretty good or going to get better. And when you think about nine or 10 teams possibly in the NCAA Tournament, I just think it’s going to be a year in SEC that really they thought last year was one of the better ones. The parity is incredible. And I think administrations have really put a lot of emphasis on bringing basketball up where it should be. Most everyone in our league now, over the last five years, have really improved the facilities and new locker rooms, all those type things. And obviously I think in football, I think the same thing in basketball, I think the best teams aren’t as good they used to be, I think the bad teams are better than it used to be. 

“That’s why I don’t think you’ll ever see another SEC football team go undefeated. I just think this league has gotten too good because of the Transfer Portal and the NIL. It’s going to make things more, the parity is going to be there. I don’t think you’re going see a bunch of guys go sit behind a quarterback for two or three years. They’re going to want to play and take advantage of the fact that they can leave when they need to leave, or want to leave.”

If he’s happy with the progress made by Tennessee sophomores Cade Phillips, JP Estrella and Cameron Carr

“Well it depends on what day it week. Some days I do it some I do. But JP has missed a lot of time. He had a foot injury that he dealt with all summer, pretty much all of fall because we knew that we didn’t get it under control, it could possibly end up being something you’d have to maybe look at surgery. We didn’t want that to happen. So he’s done very little. He’s he’s behind conditioning wise. He’s going to have to pick that up. He played better as the game went on yesterday. 

“But the other guys are working at it. But it’s about consistency. And it always goes back to cardio toughness. Can you play when you’re tired? You can’t make a mistake and turn two points into six or eight points. And that comes from a lot of different things. But I had guys I put in yesterday and I literally said to them, you’ve got two minutes to play as hard as you can and if you do it we’ll build on it. And so that’s with the younger guys getting into, when I talk about two minutes, I’m talking about details being taken care of, just simply running down the floor, getting your transition defense set up and understanding getting inside the ball and all the technical things that come with the game that most people wouldn’t be aware of. Those are the things that we’re looking for and that’s where we’re looking for consistency from those guys. That ends up, you make winning plays out of it or if you don’t do that, you end up losing those plays. And so they’re still young, but they’re making progress, there’s no doubt about it. But they have to understand they’ve gotta get it done defensively for us, more than anything right now. 

Virginia coach Tony Bennett retiring last week

“Tony and I were together a lot this summer because we were really involved recruiting a couple different guys and we were in DC a lot this summer. And I’m not surprised because the rumor was a year ago that he was thinking about it and we talked a lot about it. And I think everyone thought this would be his last year regardless. And he came out, he was one of the first coaches that came out, and people forget this, that when the first guy came out and made I think $100,000, he spoke out and said I think every player on on our basketball team, all 13 scholarship players, should make $250,000. And everybody thought he was crazy. We should have done it. They thought he was crazy. He said they should be paid and we should do that. And now it has escalated way above that and we don’t know where the end is right now. 

“But am I surprised. Tony is so much like his dad, just a man of great principle, great character, I mean really, truly loves Jesus Christ. And he just feels like at this point in time that he couldn’t have continued to have the impact that he (had). And I believe if you watch his press conference, and I watched a little bit of it, he was very sincere in what he was saying. And I know it was a tough decision for him because I know he loves the game. But he’s young. He could take a couple years off and come back and whatever he does, he’s gonna be great at it because he’s just of great high morals and character.”

The culture of Tennessee’s athletic department as a whole

“What’s happened here, I haven’t seen anything like it in my career at all the places I’ve been and it really is leadership. I think it starts really with Randy Boyd. I think we’ve got what he does and his passion for wanting to build, I mean not only what he’s doing around town, he’s just got a great vision. I think he loves it. I think he wants Tennessee to be the best. And then Donde Plowman is the very best chancellor in the country. I mean, the fact is that both of them that signed on for five more years is a great thing for Tennessee. And then they went out and think about it, they went against the grain. It was the first time that they hired the athletic director. It wasn’t a good old boys club. They went and said, we’re going to go get an athletic director. Not going to be someone at a coach that’s moved into it. That was the way it was done. That was the way it was done. But you think about Danny White and he would tell you too, I mean he really understands where we are today. I mean, he’s got great vision. He really understands the layout in what’s happening in the country and where it’s going to go. But he also is a man of great principle in terms of, he wants us to be the very best athletic program in the country, not just one sport. And I tell people this all the time, being here, our basketball fan base, I think it’s the best in the country. I grew up three hours from here and I didn’t know it. I was offered the job two other times. I didn’t know it. Because I don’t think there was a real — and they tell me how hard Stokely was to play in, but I didn’t know it. The year I was at Alabama, I didn’t even come to the game. I was out recruiting but you go back the way, maybe it’s social media, all that stuff, the way we’re getting the story out. Because we have something special. What we got going on on campus right now, the building there and the fact that Danny White is a guy that has — he’s basically said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna make sure every team has what they need to have to compete at the highest level.’ And like I said, after the baseball championship, you hope it’s the beginning of a great tidal wave. And Tennessee deserves it. They really do. And it’s different. It’s a whole different landscape. I mean, some people are looking around thinking where it’s going, as coaches, we’re not sure yet. But you either embrace it, you’re either in the game or you’re gonna get left behind.”

Texas joining the SEC

“But the fact is, I’ve said before, I’ve got really— I mean the head coach (Rodney Terry) worked for me for what, six, seven years as an assistant coach. A lot of that staff were people that have been a part of my life and helped tremendously when we were there as a staff there. And you know, 10 years, it’s been a long time, but it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like I just got here. But the fact is with Texas, Oklahoma coming into the league, I mean I have great respect for Chris Del Conte and what he’s doing there and he’s trying to do the same thing, trying to get it back. 

“They talked about the golden years when myself, Mac Brown and Augie Garrido was there. I mean, they want that. I’m sure it was as good as we feel today, I can assure you disappointment there. I will say this, Georgia sent a pretty loud statement. They made a statement. They really did. I don’t think what people thought about going into that game. Georgia’s been there a bunch the last couple years and they’re now 3-0 against No. 1 ranked team and you got to give them credit for that. But kind of goes back to the question about Connecticut, right now. They’ve been there two years in a row. The expectations are there. The players come in expecting it. And unless something can disrupt that they’re a tough out. Am I looking forward to going back to Texas? For one main reason, I get to see my grandkids. I get to see them a little bit which I don’t hardly get to do that time of year. But I think him coming into the league, I do think this is the best athletic league in the country. And I think we have become the best basketball league in the country. When you talk about 10 going to the NCAA, possibly going to the NCAA Tournament and what we’ve all been able to do. It’s great to be here but, to me, I don’t really care one way or another.

Tennessee options behind Zakai Zeigler at point guard, his thoughts on Tennessee’s new players

“The other day our first backup behind ‘Z’ was Jordan Gainey. We put him there. Bishop Boswell is going to play some of that spot. But it goes back to versatility. We like to work with all those guys, being able to handle the ball in all different types situations.

“Of our new players, Chaz Lanier a guy that, a highly sought-after player. Final three schools were us, BYU and Kentucky. And then Igor Milicic is a 6-9, 6-0 (forward), played at UNC Charlotte. His father is the national coach of the Polish team. Also coaches professional basketball over in Europe. Very versatile. Really, really hard worker, wants to get a good player. And Darlinstone Dubar is a guy that can really shoot it. Will continue working really with all of them to understand the system, what we expect. I thought yesterday was really good for all of them because we got it on tape now. But they work, all of them work hard, they really do. 

“Then, like I said, we’ve only got 11 scholarship players this year. We got Zakai and Jahmai back and you guys know about them. We’ve got to have JP, we’ve got to have Cade, we got to have Cam. Those guys have to really, really, really help us. They all had some good moments yesterday. They did. And they had some not so good moments. But it’s really the first time that, other than JP really, Cade and Cam were getting minutes and we were finding out how long and how hard they could play. But we’re hoping that we have the versatility to play a lot of different ways and I think we can.” 

If he knows as a coach how much NIL money a player gets or if that stays between a Tennessee player and his agent

“People don’t really realize that the NIL has been around for a long, long time. People don’t realize it stands for ‘Now it’s legal.’ But my assistant (coaches), the agent talks to the collective and they talk about it. We obviously will have to know what it would be because we’ve got to go build a roster. And we’ve worked really hard. We’ve got a great staff, we’ve got some incredible support people on our staff that has really tried to take the NBA model in terms of how they look at it, how they break it down. And their deal is they know they’re going to have to pay three people, maybe four, but certainly three, a pretty good chunk of money. And then what’s the best value they can get for everything else? That’s what they got to (do), because those to me are the real big decisions. Because you got to, that’s where you really, you don’t want to miss. But it’s part of the equation now we have to deal with it. But we know we have to build a roster and manage a roster. I always talk about roster building, but now it’s more management of it. And with that said, we can’t get away from our core values who we’re about. We tell every recruit that we, that we talk to, that we don’t want to be about the money. We want you to want to come to Tennessee for all the right reasons. And then we get to that part (money), we can talk about it. But we want you to want to be here for what we talked about, how we recruit you. And that’s got to work first or the other part won’t work.”

Dalton Knecht scoring 35 points for the Lakers in a preseason game last week

“Yeah, we actually talked to him on the field Saturday at the game. He FaceTimed. He loves the University of Tennessee. He loves it here. He loves you all. He loves the fan base. And he always said to me, ‘I wish I were here (more than one year).’ And then he said, ‘I wish I never had to leave.’ And are we surprised what he’s doing? No, we’re not. Because he’s more athletic than people think. He works so hard and you just know that he’s gonna figure it out. Whatever they tell him he needs to do, he’s gonna work hard at doing that.  But he is the guy that really, I mean, took advantage of a situation and he would tell you a lot of the credit goes to his teammates who embraced him and encouraged him a year ago to step into that role ’cause I’m telling you, a year ago this time, I would’ve — I can tell you how fate works. We go to Michigan State and he was not gonna start in that game. He was not gonna start ’cause I was going to prove a point to him that if you don’t work harder defensively, you’re not gonna play. And just so happened that Zakai obviously wasn’t back (from his ACL injury), but right before we’re getting ready to go to Michigan State, Santi has a death in the family and has to go home. So we started and he showed me, I didn’t know what I was talking about.

“The running joke with my assistants, they tell me during the game all the time, they’ll say, ‘Hey, we need to get Dalton out. Or, particularly Zakai. And I will say to ’em, why? They’ll always say that he just needs a rest. The assistant (will say), ‘Hey Z, come here. Are you tired? You need to rest.’ He says, ‘I’m good.’ I said, ‘he’s good. So be quiet.’ Same thing with Dalton. And I used to tell the coaches when we started calling his number, I would say during the game to him, ’it’s time for the jockey to get off the horse.’ We let him run. But he was special to be with. He was a lot of fun. And I’m happy. We’re all happy for him. It was so great. It was difficult being in the green room because you know what had happened. He wanted to know why he fell so far. He was told he was gonna go here. They had a major upset when a guy that they thought might be a second round pick, got picked early and now it turns the table upside down. And oftentimes if you don’t go work out with a team, you don’t do things like that, those teams will bypass on you. Like our phones started blowing up. What’s wrong? Is he hurt? What’s wrong with it? What is the problem? But I think it worked out great for him.”

How much Dalton Knecht’s success helps Tennessee in recruiting

“Oh yeah. I mean him being here a year ago. Everywhere you go, people want to talk about him. People want to know how it happened. I say it’s simple. Just look at him. It helps. Anything positive that comes out of Vol Nation is good. Baseball, football. I mean, this weekend you can’t come here and not feel electrified. You can’t. And so it all comes hand in hand where we all need each other because it really rubs off on everybody.  It really does. I mean, the players, our athletes are close, believe it or not. I could talk so much, but what Tony’s done is incredible to be able to go out and how he’s done it. And our athletes want the same thing. That’s what they want. And when you get a standard that you’re trying to build, you want to be around the championship teams. You don’t ever want to be around situations where it’s just — I’ve been blessed. I’ve always enjoyed going to work. I don’t know if I’d call it work, but I love what I do.”