Tennessee’s lost its edge. Can the Lady Vols get it back?
admin_news
“In the event the women’s basketball team wins the NCAA National Championship, (Caldwell’s) base pay will be increased,” it reads, “so that (Caldwell’s) annual compensation will equal or exceed the highest salary … of any head coach of a women’s basketball team in Division I.”
An athletic department doesn’t put that line into a contract unless it genuinely cares about the women’s basketball program enough to believe that a national championship — even if it seems far off — is worth about $4.25 million a year. That’s how much it would cost Tennessee to pay Caldwell to be the highest-paid coach in Division I. That honor falls to South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, who has won three national championships and whose team beat Tennessee by 43 points earlier this season.
Tennessee doesn’t need to worry about that clause right now. On Friday night, the Lady Vols bowed out of the NCAA Tournament’s first round with a 76-61 loss to No. 7 seed NC State. The only program in NCAA history to make an appearance in every iteration of March Madness lost in the first round for just the third time, capping an eight-game losing skid to end the season.
This, after garnering a 10-seed, the second-lowest NCAA Tournament seed in program history, and after the program’s first opening-game loss in the SEC tournament. The Lady Vols won just 16 games this season — the fewest since 1975, before the NCAA Tournament even had a women’s tournament, and just the second year the program existed. And, for the first time, Tennessee finished winless in March.
It’s a new low for a program that’s accustomed to setting the bar so high.
“Not the game we wanted, really, not the season we wanted,” Caldwell said after the loss. “Nothing we can really say to help this loss.”
The Lady Vols were without their leading rebounder and second-leading scorer, Janiah Barker, but even so, it seemed like Tennessee never found its spark. With a chance to redeem some of the frustrations of the past month, Tennessee looked flat. It looked like a team that should lose in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
Every season-ending loss hurts, and it should. But at Tennessee, it hurts even more.
The coat of nostalgia weighs heavily. With each new low, somehow the past looms larger and feels that much farther away. At this point, it’s almost unbelievable that this program, just more than a year ago, beat UConn in Knoxville. At the time, there was optimism that the sparring between the Lady Vols and the nation’s top teams would return and that a win was just a taste of what could come, but the downward spiral was swift. This season, the Huskies returned the favor, delivering the biggest win in the rivalry’s history — a 30-point victory.
Tennessee fired Kellie Harper in 2024 after she couldn’t get over the Sweet 16 hump in four seasons. Two years later, there’s a genuine argument over whether the Lady Vols even deserved that No. 10 seed or if they should’ve been dropped into the teens, which is typically reserved for mid-majors.
Tennessee is no longer what it was. And, truthfully, it hasn’t been for a while.
We’re nearly two decades removed from Tennessee’s last national title. The players coming up in today’s game didn’t watch the epic battles between the Lady Vols and Huskies or remember firsthand the days that Pat Summitt’s glower on the sideline was a Final Four tradition. That aura has been replaced by a program that has all the trappings of a national prestige program, and none of the substance on the floor.
Summitt was the harshest critic and the toughest judge. She was also always herself and dug her heels in, no matter what. It pissed off several coaches, drew the ire of plenty of players and made many recruits realize that Tennessee probably wasn’t right for them.
It also won several games and eight national championships.
The Lady Vols hired Caldwell before last season, knowing she ran a high-intensity, hockey-subbing, fast, pressure system. Her practices make the Tennessee track team’s practices look amateur. A season ago, with a roster she mostly inherited, she cobbled together a roster to play in her style, a true zag in the world of basketball where most people just steal from each other. This season, after bringing in her recruits and players from the transfer portal, it just didn’t click the same.
Then, she moved on to Plan B. It might’ve been her biggest mistake. The Lady Vols stopped pressing as much. She kept players on the floor for longer stretches. They never established consistent rotations. They slowed their offensive pace and ran more halfcourt sets.
So maybe that was when Tennessee looked the least Tennessee this season, when Caldwell strayed from the DNA that made this program what it became — stubbornness beyond anything else and a belief in what you’re doing. The moment when Caldwell opted to change rather than remain steadfast with what she genuinely believes can and will work. Because one thing is certain: This season, it didn’t work.
Caldwell called it “the worst year of my professional career,” and said, “Our players deserve better than that from me.”
Historically, the hot seat hasn’t really existed in women’s basketball. A single bad year on the court alone isn’t usually enough to tilt the scales so much so that an AD brings down the hammer. Plus, Caldwell’s buyout is hovering at $4 million (roughly the same value to the university as a national title, ironically).
Still, the Lady Vols are nowhere near a national title, and that amount of money would also suggest they’re far from any leadership change. Yet, that doesn’t mean change isn’t necessary, with its expectations, mostly. There’s one other reason why an athletic department might feel comfortable putting a clause into a contract that would overnight pour $4.25 million into the women’s basketball program. And that’s if they believe it couldn’t happen.
As bad as this season was in Knoxville, even that’s a thought that’s too hard to believe when it comes to Tennessee women’s basketball.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennessee Lady Volunteers, Women's College Basketball
2026 The Athletic Media Company
