Tennessee’s lost its edge. Can the Lady Vols get it back?
On the very first page of Tennessee coach Kim Caldwell’s contract is a line that encapsulates the importance of women’s hoops in Knoxville. “In the event the women’s basketball team wins the NCAA National Championship, (Caldwell’s) base pay will be increased,” it reads, “so that (Caldwell’s) annual compensation will equal or exceed the highest salary … of any head coach of a women’s basketball team in Division I. ” An athletic department doesn’t put that line into a contract unless it genuinely cares about the women’s basketball program enough to believe that a national championship — even if it seems far off — is worth about $4.
25 million a year. That’s how much it would cost Tennessee to pay Caldwell to be the highest-paid coach in Division I. That honor falls to South Carolina’s Dawn Staley, who has won three national championships and whose team beat Tennessee by 43 points earlier this season.
Tennessee doesn’t need to worry about that clause right now. On Friday night, the Lady Vols bowed out of the NCAA Tournament’s first round with a 76-61 loss to No. 7 seed NC State.
The only program in NCAA history to make an appearance in every iteration of March Madness lost in the first round for just the third time, capping an eight-game losing skid to end the season. This, after garnering a 10-seed, the second-lowest NCAA Tournament seed in program history, and after the program’s first opening-game loss in the SEC tournament. The Lady Vols won just 16 games this season — the fewest since 1975, before the NCAA Tournament even had a women’s tournament, and just the second year the program existed.
And, for the first time, Tennessee finished winless in March. It’s a new low for a program that’s accustomed to setting the bar so high. “Not the game we wanted, really, not the season we wanted,” Caldwell said after the loss.
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