The Day's Summary

Thursday brought a single, stock-taking piece on Tennessee's preseason: an On3 column weighing what the Volunteers' two exhibition losses actually mean. The defeats do not count in the standings, but they have shaped the conversation around a team still coming together under Rick Barnes, and the column set out to judge how much concern they should cause and what they reveal.

For Tennessee, the value of those exhibitions will be measured by what follows. If the problems they exposed are corrected once the regular season begins, the losses become an early lesson; if they linger, they will look like the first warning of a longer problem.