What Tennessee has in its' favor is a rabid fan base, and a tremendous history.
However, they are not a top team any more. They are barely a top 25 team, if that, and poised to drop further in the future. Warlick was a tremendous recruiter (I say she recruited circles around Harper), but was permanently stuck in the old Pat Summit coaching mold - get athletic players, one on one offense, crash the O-boards, play in your face defense. Certain parts of that plan are great, but the lack of anything resembling offense was never gonna work. And she seemingly did not have any assistants with great offensive basketball minds to fill in the areas where she was deficient.
Recruiting under Harper, however, has completely gone off the rails. Horston, and her class that went to Tennessee, was recruited by Warlick. Since then Harper's gotten exactly 1 kid in the top 15 over the last 4 recruiting cycles.
- 2020 her top recruit was #57 Salary
- 2021 it was #43 Puckett
- 2022 it was #11 Pissot
- 2023 it's a total bagel - 0 recruits
Sure she bolstered the roster with kids like Jackson (Miss State), Hollingshead (Georgia), Powell (Minny), Walker (WMU), and Franklin (Missouri State), but to have 0 recruits with at least 6 seniors on the team bodes very ill next season. Some of the kids will need to stay and use the covid year, and she'll need to clean up in the portal again, but really, if Tennessee did not have such a storied past, they would be a largely irrelevant middle of the pack team. They are living on fumes from prior greatness.
My point is unless something happens fast, they are poised to sink to the middle of the SEC pack, and potentially start being a perennial NIT invitee. So really, aside from nostalgia, there's no reason for the game. The "hype" surrounding it is old, and they are sinking fast. Frankly, I have no problem continuing to play them as I foresee 30-40 point blowouts in our mutual future should they play starting next season.
But the constant barrage of "Women's college basketball needs UCONN-Tennessee" is just silly. There are TONS of more compelling story lines including a host of new, and historical, programs vaulting towards the top.
- How long can SC stay at the top?
- Stanford has vaulted themselves back into the NC conversation over the past several years
- Mulkey is making great strides at LSU
- Schaeffer is doing exciting things at Texas
- ND is showing they are more than Muffet McGraw
- Lawson and the Duke story line
- Arizona is trying to show staying power
- North Carolina is back to being a national player
- The Big East is stronger than ever
Geno has done so much for WCBB over the years that he has zero to prove. AND he owes WCBB nothing in the sense of "for the good of the game to play Tennessee". That's a load of cr@p. The rivalry between those 2 schools existed in part because of the coaches and in part because no one was consistently better than those 2 schools for a very long time.
New rivalries, new coaches, etc. Great players, great play, great stories, all those things make WCBB compelling. The game needs more of that and less "manufactured" circuses...