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in response to johnlg00:

You make a number of good points. I would like to offer yet another way to look at this basketball season to hopefully add a little context to this UT team's failings. Last night, Wisconsin beat #1 ranked Indiana at Bloomington, IN. This is the same Wisconsin team that lost to the Virginia team that UT came within an eyelash of beating on THEIR home court. It is risky to try to predict outcomes of games on the basis of comparison of common opponents, but it does provide a certain context.

As for the Vols' poor FT shooting, a significant cause of several of their losses, I saw an article the other day that said this year is on track to be the worst overall year for FT %-age in the modern history of college basketball. This can't all be because of poor coaching all over the country.

My main point is that there are very few teams that consistently live up to the very best of their capabilities. MANY fans complained about the inconsistency of some of Bruce Pearl's better teams. These are some of the same fans who are criticizing Martin now. The Vols have had the misfortune of playing some of their worst games in a row, so of course they look worse than anybody else to anybody who sees them a lot. I will be as disappointed as anybody else if they don't start playing better soon, but, in part because I have played and coached a bit myself, I am just not going to blame the character, intelligence, or human worth of players and coaches for on-court failings the way some seem all too ready to do.

Almost no matter what happens the rest of this season, Martin will be back next year. I have no doubt that he, the staff, and the team will do a lot of soul-searching about what they all need to do to turn things around. All of the key players will be back. The whole program knows that their futures and their legacies are at stake. If they can't produce better results with that team in year three of the Martin era, that era will likely end then, and probably rightly so.