KNOXVILLE - Rick Barnes picked up the first technical foul on a Tennessee men's basketball coach since the Bruce Pearl era during the 23rd-ranked Volunteers' 76-65 win over No. 17 Kentucky on Saturday night.
That the drought finally ended in Barnes' third season as coach hardly shocked his players.
"If I had a whistle, I would T him up in practice," said junior forward Admiral Schofield, who helped restrain Barnes as the coach protested a foul call on Grant Williams early in the second half. "I'm just kidding. But I wasn't surprised.
"We've been saying it for the last couple of weeks that we were just wondering when they were going to get him. It's just because he's very competitive."
Schofield said the Vols (10-4, 1-2 Southeastern Conference) were already motivated when Barnes picked up the technical, having erased most of an eight-point halftime deficit. But Schofield said what the Vols deemed a questionable foul call on Williams - and Barnes' reaction to it - seemed to get the sell-out crowd of 21,678 into the game.
Tennessee gave them plenty to cheer about as it honed in on the neglected portions of its game plan and continued flipping the game's momentum against the Wildcats (12-3, 2-1).
Barnes said Tennessee associate head coach Rob Lanier identified 11 points Tennessee allowed in the first half stemming from a failure to follow the pregame scouting report. Nine of those points came from forward Wenyen Gabriel, who leads Kentucky by having made 46 percent of his shots from 3-point range this season.
The Vols failed to close out on Gabriel in the first half, and he made all three of his long-distance tries.
"They're a terrific, unbelievably coached team, and they're going to make some baskets, just like we make baskets," Barnes said. "But you don't want them making the ones where we fail to execute our game plan. That was pretty much what we talked about (at halftime)."
Gabriel air-balled his only 3-point attempt of the second half, which came with a Tennessee defender in his face.
"I think we got our identity back, our swagger back," Schofield said. "That's the biggest thing, getting confidence back in our defense, because that's what we are is a defensive team. We just execute our offense and what coach is drawing up. I think we did that, especially in the second half, and got back to that."
Tennessee did find its mojo offensively in the second after struggling to get open looks against Kentucky's length in the first half.
John Fulkerson grabbed a rebound with 11:28 to go in the second half and passed to Lamonte Turner, who passed to Grant Williams. For a moment, Williams appeared to consider foraying into the paint, but he found James Daniel open in the opposite corner with a skip pass. Daniel pump-faked a shot and drew a defender in the air before dishing to forward Kyle Alexander in the high post. Alexander declined a decent shot opportunity by passing back to Turner, who was open on the wing.
As a Kentucky defender came soaring at Turner, he pump-faked and took a single dribble. Then he fired a crisp pass to a wide-open Daniel on the opposite wing.
Daniel drilled the 3-pointer to give Tennessee a 54-47 lead.
In a span of 13 seconds, all five Vols in the game had touched the basketball - two of them twice - against Kentucky's 2-3 zone in a possession that resulted in a wide-open look.
"That's kind of just our team," Daniel said. "In one possession, that's probably our team. That could have been any one of us who made that shot, though. We're a team full of shooters and guys that can make plays."
Contact David Cobb at dcobb@timesfreepress.com.