The Tennessee women’s basketball (21-6, 9-5 SEC) made history again, though not in the way it would have liked. After losing at home for the first time against Alabama on Thursday, No. 11 Tennessee lost to No. 13 Missouri on the road in Columbia for just the second time since the teams first met in 1978, 77-73.
“We weren’t really aggressive in the first half,” senior Jaime Nared said. “We came out slow, and we weren’t really dictating our defense. We started doing that in the third quarter, but at that point it was like playing catch up.”
This loss is extremely crucial, as each SEC team is headed down the home stretch toward the SEC tournament. Every win and loss counts, especially since Tennessee was in a five-way tie for third place with Missouri, LSU, Georgia and Texas A&M before Sunday’s game.
The top four seeds of the tournament do not play until Friday, two days after the SEC Tournament starts. This means that they get two extra days of practice, preparation and rest before they even play their first games.
This advantage cannot be overstated, and with Sunday’s loss, Tennessee is getting further and further away from holding down a top-four seed. Missouri moved solidly into third place, while Tennessee dropped all the way down to fifth in just one game.
“We need to pick up things we’ve struggled with the past couple of weeks,” Nared said. “It’s easy to get down on yourself if you don’t play well, but we have such a quick turnaround.”
There are a lot of factors that went into the loss, in which both teams played quality basketball. Perhaps the biggest was the lack of production by senior Mercedes Russell in the first half.
At the end of the second quarter, the post from Springfield, Oregon, had more fouls than total points, scoring zero points on 0-4 from the field and fouling twice, causing her to miss the last four minutes of the first half.
Despite this lack of production, Tennessee trailed only 42-36 at the half. Russell would wake up in the second half, going 5-of-8 from the field to score 10 more points and come just one rebound short of a double-double.
In fact, the whole team woke up offensively at halftime. After shooting just 38 percent in the first half, Tennessee made 50 percent of its shots in the entire second half to increase its overall percentage to 44.
Both teams were on fire from beyond the arch, with the Lady Vols going 8-of-15 from 3-point range and finishing with one of their highest percentages of the year. Despite overcoming the offensive deficiencies of the first half, there was another huge, glaring problem that in the end ended up directly costing Tennessee the game.
The Lady Vols only shot 69 percent from the free throw line for the game, and though this may not look terrible on paper, Tennessee was only 5-of-10 in the second half. The biggest misses from the charity stripe came with 1.7 seconds left.
Down 75-72, freshman Rennia Davis shot a 3-pointer to tie the game and missed. However, she was fouled and was sent to the line with three shots to tie the game.
Facing possibly the three biggest free throws of her career on the road, Davis missed the first, which immediately put the Lady Vols behind the eight ball.
She made her second and missed her third intentionally in the hopes that Tennessee could grab a quick rebound and put-back shot to tie the game. However, Missouri was able to pull down the rebound.
“It’s definitely tough,” Russell said. “Keeping them off of the free throw line would have been huge for us at the end. It was just a tough game.”
Tennessee will again hit the road on Thursday for its next contest, an ever-crucial road game against SEC foe Florida. Tip-off is set for 7 p.m., and the game will be broadcast on the SEC Network+.
