As with all college sports these days, Tennessee basketball has completely reloaded going into the 2025-26 season. Rick Barnes stiff-armed retirement rumors this spring despite losing the core of his program as Zakai Zeigler, Jahmai Mashack, Chaz Lanier and others hit the exits.<\/p>\n
Barnes reshaped his roster by landing a dynamic senior point guard in Ja\u2019Kobi Gillespie, along with five-star, potential top-five overall NBA selection, Nate Ament. And yet, according to any power rankings or preseason polls, Tennessee feels like an overthought once again.<\/p>\n
The bracketologist projects Tennessee to return to Houston\u2019s Midwest Region, where the Cougars are once again a projected No. 1 seed. No. 2 seed UConn, No. 4 seed Illinois and No. 5 seed Alabama join Tennessee in the mock run. Tennessee was slated to play 14-seed UNC Wilmington, potentially pairing up with No. 6 seed Texas Tech.<\/p>\n
Duke, Purdue and Florida joined Houston as the projected No. 1 seeds. St. John\u2019s, BYU, UConn and Michigan were all in the group ahead of Tennessee as projected No. 2 seeds.<\/p>\n
Tennessee will certainly have a chance to explode onto the scene early this season.<\/p>\n
The new-look Volunteers will scrimmage Duke before things even start to count, then run a non-conference gauntlet that includes Houston, Louisville, Rutgers, Syracuse and Illinois. Beyond that awaits a daunting conference slate that includes a completely loaded month of January<\/a>.<\/p>\n The SEC put 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament one season ago. Can Rick Barnes and Tennessee survive and secure another top-16 overall seed in March after running the gauntlet once again? It\u2019s going to be mighty interesting to see without Zeigler and Mashack running the show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As with all college sports these days, Tennessee basketball has completely reloaded going into the 2025-26 season. Rick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,398,400,401,99,74725],"class_list":["post-114862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-sports","tag-tennessee-volunteer-basketball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}