With Tennessee on verge of Final Four, Rick Barnes’ staying power is evident. But will he reach NCAA tournament’s final weekend again?

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.

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“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.

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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…

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Author : Dan Wolken

Publish date : 2026-03-28 23:25:00

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