Crayon Angels Under the Crayon Sun
A cardinal song
January 17: #9 Tennessee 70, Mississippi State 59 (15-3, 5-1 SEC)
January 21: #9 Tennessee 77, LSU 56 (16-3, 6-1 SEC)
Saw my grandmother this weekend. She’s doing good, as good as one can be at an advanced age and in a newly empty house. We got to watch a couple of games together. This is still unusual to me, because growing up, my grandmother did not care for sports whatsoever. I do not recall a single instance of watching any sporting event with her; it was always my grandfather whom I crafted that bond with. But right around the time I left rural Tennessee for the big town (going to college in America’s 132nd-largest city) she started watching basketball with my grandfather.
It makes sense in a couple of ways. My little brother is not terribly interested in sports, my parents (MTSU/Michigan grads) aren’t as invested in Tennessee as I am. So I like to think my grandfather slowly convinced my grandmother to give it a try. She played basketball growing up, she took me to the Civic Center to practice. Why not watch a little more from home?
This has turned into her new obsession. My grandfather left us last February, as a lot of you know; the first birthday he hasn’t been here with us was on Tuesday. I called my grandmother to make sure she’d be okay. She was sad; I was sad. We both laughed and teared up. But we both had something to look forward to: a basketball game involving Tennessee at 7 PM my time, 6 PM hers.
This new, strange thing is wonderful, though probably impacted by the pandemic. My grandmother has not physically been to church, her favorite place in the world, in nearly three years. In her defense, she is, you know, a grandmother. She’s a lot older than I am at this point in time. But I know how important that is to her, because I grew up going with her.
Talking about faith, blind or real, strikes me as a bit gauche for a blog about basketball. You did not sign up for a faith talk, obviously, but it is important to the story. Whether I knew it or not - now, know it or not - she’s probably the most influential person in my life in a very specific regard. Growing up in the South you are legally required to attend church until age 16 or so. Everything after that’s a personal call. My personal call is that I kept going, even after I switched denominations, even after I changed churches, even after I became pretty tired of certain responses to certain issues.
She misses it. She knows enough about computers to log onto Facebook and watch a sermon, which the church has elected to helpfully stream live for an audience like her. But you and I and everybody know that experiencing such through a screen is not the same as experiencing such in person. This goes for nearly anything in life: church, a concert, a travel show, a sporting event. The goal is to get her back there one day, because it is where she feels at home. For now, her home is ESPN’s family of networks, four times a week for both men’s and women’s basketball.
The aspect of this post that deals with the 2022-23 Tennessee men’s basketball program is located here. I have made grandiose statements before; I have seen things. I have been wrong many, many times in my life. I am going to be wrong many, many times in the future, and will be wrong a lot this season. I am prepared to admit that and admit comfort in it. All of that leads to a statement I shared Saturday on the Elon Musk application.
Sharing one’s own tweets is, similar to my feelings on talking on faith here, a little gauche. But friend of the Substack Grant Ramey said it was okay to pimp out my own work, even if my grandmother would be horrified that I used that exact phrase, so that’s why we’re here.
I am 29 years old. I have covered Tennessee basketball, in part or in full, for six seasons now. I began watching the team play in 2001. I can remember listening to them lose to New Mexico on the radio just as well as I can remember them beating #1 Memphis in Memphis a few years later. I am well aware of the excellence that has taken the floor over the decades: a brief #1 cameo in 2007-08, the Elite Eight run in 2009-10, a multi-week #1 cameo in 2018-19, the SEC championship of 2021-22, and the up-and-down excellence of the Jerry Green era. I was not there for it, but I am well aware of the fact that Ray Mears won a lot of games and changed Tennessee forever.
All of those are facts. What I am sharing now is a belief - a blind faith - that I possess, which is that the 2022-23 Tennessee men’s basketball team is the best to ever touch the court at the university. And this belief has gotten people either angrier or more alarmed than any other post I’ve ever put out into the world.
While I think it deserves its own post - which it will get tomorrow - I think it deserves a quick note here.
As it stands, 2022-23 Tennessee is the highest-rated team they’ve ever had in several metrics. This is the highest Tennessee has ever been on KenPom at #2 overall. Same for Torvik. Sports-Reference, which uses the Simple Rating System, has this as Tennessee’s best team in history by three full points. INCC Stats, who has a KenPom approximator dating back to the 1970s, has this team a hair ahead of 2018-19. At some point, I think that the computers with all the history may know something.
Both the 2022-23 and 2018-19 teams were excellent. I do not feel that this aspect of it should be a debate and was not the intention of the post itself. Maybe a rewording of it would more fairly say that 2018-19 and 2022-23 are the best teams the school has had, but I think that would also be a copout for my own statement.
The 2018-19, 2021-22, 2007-08, and 2009-10 teams never touched these highs in predictive metrics. Really, only 2018-19 came close; they got above a +29 AdjEM for a while on KenPom, but faded by season’s end. 2022-23 already touched +31 for a while and currently hangs about a point ahead of where 2018-19 was at this time in 2019.
Also, the 2022-23 team is going to set a record soon. They have 10 wins of 20+ points, which ties the program record set by the 1974-75 team. The next one will be a program record. There are 12 games left in the regular season, including a game in which they’re projected to beat South Carolina by 26 points. If you prefer 15+ points, 2018-19 isn’t even the leader there; it is actually the 2013-14 team, who had 19 wins by 15+.
The advantages that the 2018-19 team had are pretty clear. Their offense was far, far better than this one. That team had the stronger to-date resume with no bad losses. They had the reigning (soon to be two-time) SEC Player of the Year. They also got that sweet, sweet #1 AP Poll ranking. All of that is fair and good. And yet, on January 22, 2019:
They did not rate as a superior unit to 2022-23 Tennessee.
I think this is going to be a very stupid Twitter battle all the way until whenever the season ends. If you called the two teams as equal, I also think that’s a very agreeable opinion to hold. Even if you think 2018-19 is a little better, go for it. But acting like this year’s team is trash in comparison is a bit much. We’ll see how it shakes out.
The first game up was UCLA-Arizona. My grandmother asked who I wanted to win; I responded that I simply wanted to see a good game. She understands this, as only recently, she’s begun to watch other teams’ games for entertainment. She tells me that she can watch about two games before she tires out and needs to watch a show about birdhouses or similar. (Worth noting that she is an avid birdwatcher, as was my grandfather.) I can get that, because not all of us are sickos.
The investment she puts into these games is pretty admirable. Her phone is a Jitterbug; mine is an iPhone. She finds herself less distracted than I do. Less worried about the qualms of the announcers. Less concerned about what lineups work here or there. Not terribly afraid of what might happen when three-point regression hits. Frankly, not even that aware of how a win or a loss affects one’s March outlook. It’s a beautiful childlike way to watch basketball. It reminds me of me 20 years ago.
The second game up was Tennessee-LSU. Both teams began the game by hitting three shots in a row. Instead of fretting about What This Means or How This Will Affect the Torvik Game Score, she looked at me, smiled, and said “this should be a good game.” And I love that dearly. That is the way I used to watch basketball, before I came too close. Before I had to rediscover why I liked it in the first place.
Tennessee’s game ended up far less interesting than UCLA/Arizona. It was generally not close after the first ten minutes, and as they’ve done several other times this year, Tennessee shifted into sixth gear and put the hammer down on an overwhelmed opponent. For all their flaws and warts and shortcomings, this team is better at winning with exclamation points than any before them, as covered above.
All of that is good, of course. But what matters more to me is what happened earlier in the week, when Tennessee was down multiple starters and lost a third quasi-starter (Uros Plavsic) to injury in the second half. Tennessee put up the worst 16 minutes of offensive basketball I’ve seen them produce since the immortal 37-36 game. It reinforced all of the bad things one can think about this team. They are prone to stretches where the offense looks like a disaster. Sometimes they turn it over a bunch. Sometimes, they simply miss bunches of open shots.
Tennessee had 13 points through 17 minutes. Then they had 57 in the next 23. To overcome the adversity, the injury luck, the fact that seemingly nothing could possibly go right early on…that feels familiar, yet different. To quote a great philosopher of our times:
This (stuff) means something to me, man. That’s why it feels different. That’s why, when my grandmother mentioned on Tuesday that she couldn’t remember a few players’ names, I created PDFs for her that featured every player on the men’s and women’s rosters, along with key stats and things she needed to know. Maybe this is the team that gets over the hump. I cannot worry about that yet, as she reminded me, because there are a lot of games left to go.
But I can see why she loves this particular group of crayon angels so much. They are flawed and full of warts and imperfect, yes. But so is everyone else in college basketball this year. There is no #1 team. The #1 team, Houston, will enter March having last played a Top 25 opponent in December. If nothing else, this team sits #2 in every predictive metric, has the best defense in America, and has quietly turned their offense around over the last month-plus. They screw up often and can be a pain from time to time. At the same time, they are also really, really good.
It could all go south. It always can. It requires a certain amount of blind faith to get over the fear of March happening once again. The misery waiting around the corner is real. I get it. But I also get my grandmother’s view: that life is short. That we are not here for very long. That the people you enjoy today may not be here tomorrow. And simply put: that when our crayon angels leave us - those of us who are deeply, deeply flawed, which is everyone - we can step up and be the crayon angels under the crayon sun for those around us.
And maybe, this time, it will be different. It is better to hope than to not have hope. My grandmother, my crayon angel, said that once.
Because there will be a real analysis post tomorrow, and because this is a post I have wanted to get out of my system for weeks, there is just one ANALYSIS point here, which is:
Tennessee is a lot better when Josiah-Jordan James plays. Which is the single most obvious thing anyone could ever tell you. But also:
Every commentator mentions the first thing; I haven’t heard anyone mention that Tennessee makes a drastic shift as an offense once James touches the floor. The assist rates are generally the same, as are the rebounding and turnover numbers. The huge difference is the shot selection splits. To use last year’s full-season numbers, Tennessee essentially goes from having Gonzaga or Arizona’s shot selection splits to playing like Jay Wright’s Villanova teams when JJJ is out there.
That’s a pretty huge difference maker. Part of it, obviously, is who James is playing with. When James is on the court, it most commonly pushes him to the 4 with Julian Phillips at the 3. 64% of the center minutes go to Jonas Aidoo or Olivier Nkamhoua, which means that about two-thirds of the time (when JJJ is available) Tennessee’s putting out lineups where the 5-man can shoot threes. That’s genuinely a huge shift in philosophy from where the team was even last year down the stretch.
How this shakes out going forward remains to be seen, and I also do not anticipate that James continues taking 63% of all his shot attempts from three. But there’s a real big difference in how the court is spaced when he’s available versus when he’s not. It’s the added dimension that I think Tennessee was sorely missing in non-conference play, and to boot, they’ve shot about 3% worse from deep when James isn’t in the game.
OTHER NOTES:
I clipped this from Flipping the Field, the only good college football podcast I am aware of. I tried to figure out how to fit it in here and couldn’t, but I do recommend listening; host Patrick Mayhorn explains how he left Ohio State football fandom behind, struggled with loving college football, and found his love again by moving to Utah. It is perhaps the most beautiful description of Why We Care I have ever heard in my life. Whether you like it or not, Tennessee is alarmingly committed to their identity.
That time of year again: 13 of the Top 25 teams in the most recent AP Poll lost at least one game this week.
Top ten teams since December 1. None of the top six are surprising, but check out TCU and Boise State at the back end here.
Wes Rucker’s piece on this being the best Tennessee team ever isn’t going to be a popular one with a subset of followers but covers a lot of ground I was going to cover tomorrow.
Tyler Wyatt, betting expert, favors the 2022-23 Vols by 4.5 points over 2018-19.
Most influential man in college basketball at this moment appears to be my friend Evan Miyakawa, whose Kill Shot metric keeps getting referenced on broadcasts.
Todd in the Shadows’ top 10 hits of 2022. I’ll never like Sam Hunt but the top two (spoiler: Steve Lacy and Taylor Swift) are great. Also it seems I should try the Chris Stapleton deal again.
People remember the 18-19 team more fondly because they were more fun to watch (aka had a better offense). But people forget the late push to finally put away Colgate, blowing the 25 point lead to Iowa, and going down 20+ against Purdue before storming back in the Sweet 16. That team was great, but it had real flaws that people don't seem to remember.
Great stuff my friend. Always appreciate your willingness to keep it real even when that means swimming upstream.