If there has been a knock on Rick Barnes’ tenure at Tennessee, it’s that as good as the Vols have been, they haven’t completed any of the big-picture goals. UT tied for the regular season SEC title in 2018 but actually lost the tiebreaker to Auburn. The Vols had not won an SEC Tournament title in Barnes’ 7 seasons in Knoxville, and they haven’t gotten past the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.

But Sunday, Barnes’ balanced and defensive-minded Vols knocked out a glass ceiling with an SEC Tournament championship win over Texas A&M 65-50. Tennessee took control early, opening the game with a 14-0 run and never facing a real threat from A&M. The 2022 squad is probably not Barnes’ most exciting team, and certainly not the most star-laden. All they have done is improve down the stretch of this season — and that led to an SEC crown that UT hadn’t seen the likes of since 1979.

Sunday’s final didn’t feature the SEC’s leading scorer, Scotty Pippen, Jr., the league’s likely Player of the Year, Oscar Tshiebwe, or the probable runner-up, JD Notae. None of the SEC’s top 9 scorers played in Sunday’s title game, and the Vols’ scoring leader, Kennedy Chandler, is 12th in the league in scoring. In terms of scoring average, UT has 2 double-digit players — Chandler, the freshman who is maturing in every game, and Santiago Vescovi, a junior who has to be the best Uruguayan player in the SEC. The Vols start a power forward who averages barely 4 points per game.

But what Tennessee did in 3 games in Tampa was refuse to allow opposing offenses a degree of comfort. They held Mississippi State to just under 40% shooting, Kentucky to just 34% shooting, and finished by holding a visibly tired Texas A&M squad to 31%. The Vols’ 3 opponents connected on a dozen 3-pointers. Total. The Vols hit 12 3-pointers on Sunday.

Tennessee isn’t flashy. The things the Vols do well tend to be effort-focused and the result of extensive attention from Barnes and his players. UT is at its best in steals (9th in the nation entering Sunday), offensive rebounding (11.9 per game is 39th in NCAA basketball), and opposing field goal shooting (opponents are at just 40.3% on the season coming into Sunday, 36th in the nation).

Tennessee has had its fair share of memorable players and memorable teams since 1979. Allan Houston, Chris Lofton, Wayne Chism, Tony Harris, Grant Williams, and so many others filled all-SEC rosters, and scoring lists, and sometimes NBA rosters. But no UT team has done a better job — probably since giving up 107 points to Kentucky in Lexington on Jan. 15 — of buckling down, playing solid defense, and giving up individual stardom for a collective identity. It’s now an identity as champions.

For A&M, surely the NCAA bubble does not bust here? If anything, the Aggies’ poor Sunday performance illustrates the virtual impossibility of playing 4 strong games in 96 hours. The Aggies had 3 of those performances and even trimmed UT’s early lead to 5 early in the second half. But if consecutive wins of Florida, Auburn and Arkansas didn’t establish the Aggies as an NCAA Tournament team, then the metric of what constitutes such a team is broken. It’s that simple.

But in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s final, the talk isn’t on the Aggies. It’s on Barnes, who finished a run in his 7th year as a Vol, winning a trophy that UT last won shortly after the 67-year-old Barnes finished his playing days at Lenoir-Rhyne. It’s on a UT team that won the SEC Tournament without a single 20-point scoring performance from a Vol player in the Tournament. It’s on Kennedy Chandler, who has learned volumes on the team game in the past 2 months, on Josh Fulkerson, who completed 6 years of SEC basketball as a conference champion, on non-superstar recruits like Vescovi and Zakai Zeigler, who pulled the Vols through in Tampa against more highly-regarded opponents. It’s Tennessee’s time. If nobody is a superstar, maybe everybody is a superstar.