CHICAGO — Gather ‘round the campfire, y’all, and let deacon Rick Barnes take you on a trip through college basketball history.
The year is 1987. Barnes is a 32-year-old assistant coach at Ohio State. He’s at the old Omni in Atlanta, which happened to be the same NCAA tournament site as Southwest Missouri State, which pulled a big upset over Clemson in the first round and took Kansas to the wire two days later.
“I saw what I thought was the very best defensive team I’d ever seen,” Barnes recalled.
After the tournament ends, Barnes gets the head coaching job at George Mason. He calls the coach of that team he watched in Atlanta, Charlie Spoonhour, and asks if he can come visit and learn about what he was doing. He comes home with a set of drills that Spoonhour learned at Nebraska from Moe Iba, who of course learned them from his father Henry Iba, whose Oklahoma A&M Aggies won the NCAA championship in 1945 and 1946.
“I don’t think I’ve ever invented anything with this game,” Barnes said Saturday. “But I know that I’ve been a guy that stole a lot of stuff from a lot of coaches. People ask me all the time about how the game has changed. It has. But in some ways, it hasn’t.”
In a basketball life as long as the one Barnes has lived, the story of how he ended up here, with another shot Sunday to make his second Final Four at age 71 when Tennessee plays Michigan, can seem like an exhibit in a museum. From working under Wimp Sanderson and Gary Williams to drills borrowed from Bob Knight and Dean Smith to meeting Tom Izzo 1985 on a recruiting trip in Ohio to coaching an 8-year-old Sean Miller at the Pitt basketball camp in 1977 to coaching Kevin Durant 20 years ago at Texas, there is a through line that reaches back almost to the beginning of the sport and forward into forever.
From George Mason to Providence to Clemson to Texas and finally his last stop at Tennessee, not much has changed for Barnes. With a tweak here and there, it is largely the same drills, the same principles, the same smothering, in-your-face defensive style that has carried him to the NCAA tournament a remarkable 30 times in a just-as-remarkable 39 years as a head coach.
But here’s what’s different now, on the eve of trying to get the Volunteers to their first Final Four in program history: After carrying a reputation as a March underachiever for much of his career, his third straight Elite Eight at Tennessee is a reminder of how much things can change in this tournament without much else changing at all.
“I made mistakes back then in coaching, probably in this tournament, certainly,” Barnes said in his genteel, western North Carolina twang. “Maybe putting way too much pressure on guys and maybe changing up what we did, probably doing too much as opposed to doing less. But I will never take away from [past teams] because I know how hard they work. And I know that, yeah, we lost some heartbreaking games. I wish we would have won a national championship and all that. All I can tell you is that we stand where we are and keep fighting as long as we can.”
Tennessee, of course, has a monster challenge in front of it Sunday. Michigan, the No. 1 seed in the Midwest regional, has been the best defensive team analytically in college basketball all season. Among all four Elite Eight games, the Wolverines are the biggest favorite. Tennessee, a No. 6 seed that stumbled into March with four losses in its last six games, was not supposed to be here at all.
And yet, this matchup is as appetizing as any because you rarely get a moment where someone like Barnes, who has been a towering figure in the sport longer than his current players have been alive, can alter his legacy so much in a mere 40 minutes of basketball.
“It would mean everything,” Tennessee forward Jaylen Carey said. “We want to break that barrier that held him back for so long.”
Barnes had already been around a long time when T.J. Ford, Brandon Mouton and Royal Ivey brought him to his first Final Four, breaking Texas’ 56-year drought before running into Carmelo Anthony and Syracuse in the semifinals.
But suddenly, on the heels of that run, he was a coaching superstar just shy of his 50th birthday. With Texas’ resources and an established brand, better recruits started to come: P.J. Tucker, LaMarcus Aldridge, D.J Augustin and, yes, Durant.
Which is also where the narrative around Barnes started to go haywire. Over the next dozen years after his Final Four, his tournament record was 12-11 — including the Durant team losing by 19 points in the second round to Taj Gibson’s and Nick Young’s USC team.
Texas fired him, Tennessee hired him and Barnes kept doing what he does: Coach winning basketball. The tournament record, however, didn’t change much. Though Tennessee got to the Sweet 16 twice in a six-year span — more than acceptable relative to its history — Barnes got knocked out by two No. 11 seeds, a No. 12 seed and a No. 9 seed with teams that were all good enough on paper to go much deeper.
The criticisms were fair. Barnes, arguably the sport’s consummate gentleman, never pushed back on them. And now, three straight Elite Eights later, he’s not wagging his finger.
“I'm not going to sit here and act like I've tried to figure something out, because I haven't,” he said. “We try to be consistent. As a staff, we try to be same every day.”
Because of what isn’t on his résumé, Barnes is probably not going to be recognized in the same class as Izzo or Rick Pitino or John Calipari, who continue to churn out good teams into their late 60s and 70s.
But perhaps his career will be a testament to at-bats. If you do this long enough and well enough, year after year, those principles you learned from the Ibas and imparted to generations of future NBA players like Tennessee freshman Nate Ament will eventually lead you where you’re supposed to go. Even if it takes decades.
That’s a hard concept for younger coaches like Michigan’s 49-year-old Dusty May to grasp. Given the volatility of their jobs and the massive amounts of money they make, most of them cannot envision doing this with the longevity of Barnes and others in his generation.
When I mentioned that to May, his eyes got really big and he shook his head before telling a story about picking the brain of Ryan Alpert, the current Georgia Tech athletic director, who worked with May at Florida Atlantic before becoming Tennessee’s deputy AD. May, who long admired the attention to detail with which Tennessee’s teams went through their pregame warmups, wanted any piece of useful information.
“I actually started drinking kombucha tea because Alpert told me they had a kombucha machine in the locker room,” May said. “If I can coach with the longevity of Coach Barnes, as well as he’s done it, I’ll try to steal any secret sauce. Maybe it’s the kombucha.”
More likely, it’s just the basketball, which will keep Barnes going whether or not Sunday is the long-awaited second Final Four.
“If you love being in the gym and coaching basketball, why not do it for as long as you can?” Barnes said. “The game has certainly changed, but [our generation] got into it because we love coaching basketball. I know talking to those guys, even today, they still really love the challenge of putting together a group of guys that can play beautiful basketball. It’s easier today than it was back then. You can recruit a guy now for a week and get him: What’s the number? In some ways, it gets easier, but the stakes are higher.
“I know this: You don’t take any of it for granted.”