Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Football league for the 2025 NFL season<\/a>]<\/p>\nBarnes said in the statement that it is “an honor and a blessing” to serve as the Volunteers’ head coach.<\/p>\n
White went more in-depth into his praise of Barnes on Thursday’s episode of the Mike Keith Show, breaking the news of the lifetime contract to Keith, the voice of Tennessee football and basketball.<\/p>\n
“He does a phenomenal job of recruiting high-character, young kids into our program that leave as really unbelievable representatives to our university, the culture,” White said. “We want him leading our program for as long as he wants to coach.”<\/p>\n
Barnes, who was hired by the team in 2015, has already become one of the most successful coaches in the program’s history. In 10 seasons with the team, Barnes has led Tennessee to seven NCAA tournament appearances (including back-to-back Elite Eight appearances over the past two years), two SEC Conference titles (2018, 2024) and an SEC tournament championship (2022).<\/p>\n
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Prior to Barnes’ tenure, the Volunteers had only one other Elite Eight appearance and five Sweet Sixteen appearances in a 50-year span; they’ve now made the Sweet Sixteen or beyond four times in the past 10 years (not counting 2020, which was canceled due to COVID-19). Tennessee had won the SEC four total times in the 40 years before Barnes took over, and now have three more conference trophies.<\/p>\n
Barnes, 71, has led the Vols to a 232-109 record in his 10 seasons.<\/p>\n
Barnes has been coaching college basketball for five decades, starting as an assistant coach at Davidson in 1978. Prior to joining the Volunteers, Barnes spent 17 seasons as Texas’ head coach. His overall head coaching record is 836\u2013421.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tennessee is locking in men’s basketball head coach Rick Barnes for the rest of his coaching career. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,75692,75693,398,400,401,17961,99,2219],"class_list":["post-117061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-basketball","tag-basketball","tag-danny-white","tag-history-of-tennessee","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-ncaabasketball","tag-rick-barnes","tag-sports","tag-tennessee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117061","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=117061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}