Can the Vols Win it All?

March Madness is four days old, but Vols fans are most worried about April when the Final Four heads to San Antonio. The question is this: Can the Vols bring home a championship this year?

Since Tennessee spent last week ranked as the #1 team in the country, it seems a no-brainer that the Vols can win it all. If you listen to the experts, however, the Vols are rarely mentioned as a tournament favorite.

So is Tennessee a contender or not?

There are six teams that seem to have the best chance of bringing home the hardware this year: Tennessee, Memphis, UNC, Kansas, UCLA and Duke.

Frankly, Duke probably is not as good as they have played this year, so they might belong in the Could Be Contenders category that includes Texas, Xavier, Georgetown and Indiana.

We'll add a few more teams to the discussion in my It Wouldn't Blow My Mind category: Louisville, Vanderbilt, Michigan State and Stanford.

Beyond that, the rest of the tournament is in the Not Gonna Happen category. Sorry, UConn, Wisconsin and Butler.

That is a grand total of 14 teams who can win it all. That gives the Vols a 7% chance of winning it all. That is a wonderful number considering that for the last 99 years of Tennessee basketball, it was 0%.

What will it take for the Vols to emerge out of those teams? The biggest factor in the tournament is match-ups. If the Vols get a favorable draw, they could be in San Antonio without too much trouble. If the match-ups are bad, they might not get to the Sweet Sixteen.

The most glaring favorable match-up for the Vols is a team with weak guard play and limited depth. Pearl will press the begeezus out of this type of team and win the game at the end of the two halves. Another good match-up for the Vols would be an athletic team because, outside of Memphis, there is not a more athletic team in the nation than Tennessee.

Troublesome match-ups? Here are the things I worry about for the Vols going into the tournament:

1) Zone defenses - On paper, the Vols can shoot a team out of its zone. In reality, it is not as easy to shoot under the bright lights of the NCAA tournament as it is in Thompson-Boling Arena. The Vols have not seen too many zones this year, but Georgia's gave Tennessee trouble the entire game. The zone also slows down the game, which hurts Tennessee's depth advantage.

2) A physical defense - UCLA is the one team I don't want to see for this reason. The Bruins play a hands-on, bump-you style of man-to-man defense that entices teams to settle for jumpers all game long. The Vols played fairly well against Memphis's underrated man-to-man, but a physical game is not the Vols speciality.

3) A tournament-tested team - UNC, Duke, etc. These guys expect to be in San Antonio. As great as the Vols have been under Pearl, tournaments have been a different story. Tennessee has zero SEC tournament wins under Pearl. It escaped the 1st round two years ago against Winthrop when Chris Lofton made a miracle three-pointer from the deep corner, then was handled fairly easily by Wichita State. Last year the Vols made it to the Sweet Sixteen with an easy win over Long Beach State and a good win over Virginia, but blew a 20 point lead to Ohio State. There are still some tournament doubts about the Vols. Are they mentally tough enough? Does their style of play work in March?

It is premature and silly to predict a tournament champion before the seedings set up the match-ups, but there is no reason to think the Vols cannot win the entire thing this season. There is a reason the Vols are the #1 team in the RPI standings - they have played a brutally tough schedule and still only have three losses for the year. They have wins over Xavier, Gonzaga, Memphis, Vanderbilt, West Virginia, Mississippi State and Arkansas - all in the Top 40 according to the RPI rankings. They win on the road. They win close games. They can play full-court games and half-court games.

The question is whether they can play six good games in a row to earn Tennessee its first men's basketball championship.