UT vs. Kentucky: No lack of storylines

Tennessee's homecourt win streak is gone, the Vols are clinging perilously to a top-25 ranking (No. 24), and the odds-on midseason favorites for SEC player of the year are wearing blue tonight.

What's left for UT is defending the SEC men's basketball championship the Vols won last season, and it starts with a near must-win game tonight.

"They (Kentucky) are the benchmark,'' UT coach Bruce Pearl said, "and we are all compared based on our success or failure against the Wildcats.''

Thompson-Boling Arena is sold out for tonight's 9 o'clock tip (12-4, 1-0 SEC) and a national ESPN audience will be looking in to see which Tennessee (10-4, 1-0) team shows up.

Will it be the one that convincingly beat Big East heavies Georgetown and Marquette? Or the one that came apart in losses at unranked Kansas and Temple?

The one that trailed lowly Georgia by double-digits? Or the one that came back and won that same game Saturday by nine?

Within the framework of this early-season battle for SEC supremacy are underlying individual matchups worthy of a Las Vegas undercard:

In the heavyweight ranks, it's 6-foot-9, 235-pound Kentucky standout Patrick Patterson versus UT's Wayne Chism (6-9, 242).

While Patterson is unanimously regarded as the best center in the league, Chism couldn't crack the SEC's second team at media days.

"It will be Wayne versus Patrick Patterson,'' Pearl said. "We'll go at him, and he'll go at us.''

Vols' captain Tyler Smith (6-7, 215) was the preseason SEC player of the year, but Wildcats' forward Perry Stevenson (6-9, 207) got the best of Smith last season.

The cumulative numbers from last year's UT-UK games reads like this: Smith 8-of-23 shooting, 11 rebounds, 20 points; Stevenson 10-of-15 shooting, 20 rebounds, 27 points.

"Perry Stevenson has been a Vol killer,'' Pearl said. "He's a guy who leads them in blocked shots and changes the game with his defense.''

Finally, Pearl hopes the final challenge for UT within this border state war resembles a tag-team cage match, with Vols switching out and teaming up to stop Jodie Meeks, the SEC's leading scorer at 24.2 points per game.

Alas, the coaching matchup has an underlying storyline, too: UT assistant Steve Forbes, who handled the scouting report for this game, left Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie at Texas A&M to join the Vols, and when Gillisipie got Kentucky job, Forbes elected to stay at UT.

A couple of the Vols' players said no to Gillisipie as well: Bobby Maze said before the season he was very close to signing with the Wildcats, and Kentucky wasn't even the second choice of Blue Grass native and McDonald's All-American Scotty Hopson.

"There will be a whole different kind of excitement in here,'' Smith said, "because this is Kentucky.''

Batting .500: Kentucky has more wins against Pearl at UT (3) than any team and is one of three SEC teams with a .500 win percentage (3-3) against the Vols over the past three seasons. Arkansas (2-2) and LSU (2-2) are the other two.

Benchmark: The Vols' bench has outscored opponents in 12 of 13 games, however Georgia's bench had 29 points to UT's 11 in the last outing.

The line: UT has opened as a 7 1/2-point favorite, with the over/under (total points) at 149.