Rick Barnes isn’t spending much time worrying about the number beside Tennessee’s name.
The No. 8 Vols open the 2026-27 season Tuesday night against Wofford, and this is still a roster in the early stages of becoming itself.
Tennessee has 13 newcomers and only a couple of returners, which means the preseason has been less about polish and more about discovery. The talent is obvious.
The chemistry and habits still have to prove themselves when the games count.
Barnes made it clear earlier in the week in a conversation with Mike Keith that the outside noise doesn’t move him.
“I could care less about outside expectations,” Barnes said. “I don’t like the word worry.
I don’t care what other people think. We know what our expectations are, and believe it or not, ours are higher than the people outside.
I can assure you of that because we live with it every day.”
That’s the heart of Tennessee’s moment right now: the ranking is there, the attention is there, but the real work is happening behind the scenes. Barnes said the closed scrimmage against Davidson showed progress, especially in Tennessee’s shot selection. That mattered after the Vols’ two exhibitions, when he felt poor offense kept them from even getting to the defensive part of the game.
Still, he wasn’t sugarcoating the rest. Turnovers remain an issue, and transition defense still needs work. For Barnes, that’s all part of the same larger process - a team trying to get better one day at a time.
“I have expectations today that we’re going to get better as a basketball team,” Barnes told Keith. “I’m not just thinking about the games, because if we don’t win today, we’re not going to win tomorrow. My expectations are to get a little bit better each and every day.
“I’ve always said expectations lead to disappointments if you don’t know how to handle expectations. If you’re going out trying to please people that don’t really understand what goes into winning, that’s when the expectations will bite you.
If you embrace the expectations, if you embrace the pressure, and it’s pressure whether there’s expectations or not. We want to win.
We don’t want to get embarrassed.”
With so much turnover, Barnes says the education has to start in smaller chunks. This group has already seen what losing looks like, and now it has to learn how to win in pieces before it can sustain anything bigger.
“What we’ve got to do first of all is understand how to win four-minute games,” Barnes said. “We got to get players to realize that they can go out and give it all they got for two minutes, and then the next go-around see if they can play for 2:05, 2:10, 2:20, 2:30. Before you know it, by January, you hope they can roll for four if they have to.”
So while fans and analysts can talk about where Tennessee might end up, Barnes is focused on the stretch right in front of him. November comes first.
Then everything after that. The lofty expectations can wait until the Vols have put in the work to earn them.
Tennessee and Wofford tip off at 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 3, at Food City Center. The game airs on SEC Network.
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