The Lady Vols basketball team continued to fall from grace in the SEC tournament over the weekend in Greenville, South Carolina.
The Lady Vols basketball team continued to fall from grace in the SEC tournament over the weekend in Greenville, South Carolina.
After the first round exit to Alabama, which stands as only the second time in the history of the Lady Vols that the team was eliminated in its first game of the tournament, questions surrounding the team’s position as a tournament team continued to rise.
As of March 6, ESPN’s bracketology from Charlie Creme has projected the Lady Vols to fall in their seeding with each passing week. After the tournament, they now landed at the eight seed, their lowest projection of the season.
“We definitely need some time,” Lady Vols head coach Kim Caldwell said. “Our February back half has been absolutely brutal, and we really need to regroup and get back to who we want to be and move forward from there.”
Caldwell is right, the month of February has not been kind to the Lady Vols.
The team entered the month of February with just four losses, compared to 14 wins. At the beginning of March, the Lady Vols had just 16 wins, meaning they had accumulated just two wins in the entire month of February and the start of March.
Through the middle of February, according to Creme’s bracketology, the Lady Vols reached heights as high as the No. 3 seed, but after Jan. 29, when the Lady Vols lost a tough home game to Mississippi State, there was a clear flip.
Including the loss to Mississippi State, the Lady Vols have lost 10 of their last 12 matchups, with their only wins coming against Mizzou and Georgia.
“I think we’ve played the hardest schedule in the country,” Caldwell said. “I think the majority of that came in February, but we have significant wins, and I think that – we hope to get in and continue to try to be a different team.”
It’s an agitating process, because that same team that was atop the SEC entering February is there somewhere, but has seemingly lost all of its previous motivation and everything in between.
Where things stand, the Lady Vols are currently projected to face off against the No. 9-seeded Iowa State in the Los Angeles region hosted by No. 1 seed UCLA.
If not Los Angeles, travelling to Storrs, Connecticut, is also on the table for a meeting at UConn.
“I think when you’re in this profession, you don’t get too high, you don’t get too low. I mean, nobody was sitting here talking about us winning a national championship when we won six in a row, seven in a row,” Caldwell said. “We didn’t do that. And so you try to stay consistent. We were hopeful that we would play better today and have some juice going into it. I think we did, we had great energy in warm-ups. We had great energy in the locker room before. Probably the best energy I’ve seen, so I was a little bit surprised that we came out flat and then got in a hole we couldn’t recover.”
Selection Sunday for the women’s bracket is on March 15, where it’s there the Lady Vols will find out where their season will carry forward.