15. Tennessee

Undefeated Basketball teams aren't supposed to get dissed. So naturally Brandon Wharton was peeved when he overheard the following exchange before a game last December between USC and the 9-0 Volunteers . "Is Tennessee any good?" one fan asked. "Yeah, in football," his friend replied.

Recalls Wharton, "I came back to the bench and told everybody 'You won't believe what this man just said.' I was waiting for them to start talking about Peyton Manning ."

It will take more than a modest winning streak for the folks of Knoxville—besotted as they are with their football, not to mention their women's hoops team—to alter the barstool conversation in favor of Wharton and his teammates. However, the gentlemen Volunteers did raise their campus profile last spring by reaching the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1989. With the addition of 6'7" forward Vincent Yarbrough, one of the nation's most highly touted freshmen, to a Tennessee lineup that retains its top nine players from last season, Vols fans have even loftier expectations for the year ahead.

So once more, with feeling: Is Tennessee any good? The short answer is yes. For starters, point guard Tony Harris , SEC co-rookie of the year last season, should be better. After missing 12 of 13 field goal attempts in the Vols' 82-81 overtime loss to Illinois State in the first round of last year's NCAAs , Harris spent most of the summer working on his outside shot. "I just felt sick after that loss," says Harris , who, in a remarkable display of self-flagellation, has frequently reviewed tapes of that game. "Coming in as a freshman last year, I felt like I had to do it all by myself."

Harris and Wharton, the team's leading scorer last year and a two-time All-SEC selection, form one of the nation's highest-scoring backcourt tandems. The Vols are solid up front too. C.J. Black, a 6'8" junior, led the SEC in blocks (2.5 per game) last season, and 6'9" sophomore reserve Isiah Victor, a spring-legged post player who shot 51% from the field in '97-98, has the look of a guy ready for a breakout year. Charles Hathaway, a 6'10" sophomore, has the potential to be one of the SEC 's top centers, but only if he sheds more of the 35 pounds he put on last season while recovering from surgery to remove a blood clot in his shoulder.

How deeply Tennessee advances into the NCAA tournament will depend in the end on the offensive juice it gets from Yarbrough, a multidimensional swingman who is the program's most hotly anticipated freshman since Bernard King in 1974. Two summers ago Vols coach Jerry Green twice had to talk Yarbrough, who had just completed his junior year of high school, out of giving Kentucky a verbal commitment. "We just decided we had to have this kid," Green says. The Tennessee players feel a similar urgency about the upcoming season. "Everybody has their time to shine," says Black. "Now is our time."

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