Big Orange Tipoff Club Report - 1/9/08

I attended this season's first meeting of the Big Orange Tipoff Club today at lunchtime at Calhoun's on the River. It was a packed house that was ready to hear the wisdom of Coaches Pearl and Summitt, the seven-time national championship coach being the featured speaker of the day.

It was pretty much the same-old, same-old, though. A nice meeting, but I really like to hear speakers that I don't hear all the time around here in Knoxville. Although both our basketball coaches are fantastic speakers, I don't want to hear them saying the usual coachspeak at an event like this. I was them to reward attendees like myself with something truly insightful or a remarkable story, something like that.

As he's stated before, Coach Pearl couldn't eat anything on this game day due to nerves. He also said that he couldn't be very funny on game day either, although he was, telling the audience a bit of an off-color joke. He did take a moment to defend the perceived lack of rebounding by his team. Although he did state that he is not pleased with the rebounding of the team so far, he said that the numbers look worse than the situation actually is, because 1) our defense plays very far out on people, pulling defensive rebounders away from the rim; and 2) we have a lot of offensive possessions and take a lot of shots, which gives the opponent more defensive rebounds, because they're going to get boards on about 2/3 of our shots.

Coach Summitt spent most of her time praising her assistant coach Dean Lockwood and kidding around with Holly Warlick, who was in the audience.


As far as the game tonight, I truly envision the Vols jumping out to an early lead, then letting the Rebels hang around for a while. Ole Miss may even come back to take the lead. However, the Vols will pull away in the last 8 minutes of the game and finish with a double-digit victory. Chris will make four 3-pointers, Juannie will make three, Jordan will make two, and Chill will make one. That, my friends, is a specific prediction.