OPINION

By Mike DeCourcy

updated 12:37 p.m. ET Feb. 24, 2008

Mike DeCourcy

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - John Calipari held his final timeout until 2.9 seconds remained. There wasn't a lot of strategizing to do then. Tennessee's star guard, Chris Lofton, was about to shoot two free throws, and he was about to make them both and put the game out of reach for the Memphis Tigers. Their first loss of the season was all but official, and the coach of the not-for-long No. 1 team wanted to impart a final lecture before the buzzer sounded.

That's how it looked, anyway. The reality was more comedy than drama.

"I shouldn't have called the timeout," Calipari said. "Because if he missed the free throw, that was my last timeout. As soon as I called it I went, 'What am I doing?' "

No, the teaching came afterward, when the final score was cemented at 66-62 and Memphis had become the last team to suffer its first loss of the 2007-08 season. The Tigers will not match Saint Joseph's unbeaten regular season from 2004. They will not enter the NCAA Tournament undefeated, as UNLV did in 1991. They will not reach the ultimate level of perfection that Indiana achieved in 1976. Now, the Tigers are just another team that has shown some level of vulnerability.

"We're fine. I really wanted to win the game, but we're 26-1," Calipari said. "My thing to my team — let's learn. We needed this. Let's find out who's going to make plays. Players make plays right now. And we learned about getting outscrapped."

Curiously, the Tigers did not lose this game at the free-throw line, although they did miss six attempts in the second half. They did not lose the game by bricking 3-pointers, although the fact that they attempted nearly half of their shots from long distance and hit less than 30 percent was a serious issue. They lost by being "outscrapped."

It seemed as though Calipari used that word at least once for every loose rebound lost to the Volunteers. Tennessee, which typically plays opponents about even on the glass, blasted one of the nation's best rebounding teams by 16 boards. The fact that the leading rebounder in the game was 6-2 guard JaJuan Smith says everything about how that difference came about. Smith was running down all those long rebounds from missed Memphis threes.

"I just think we wanted it," said Volunteers forward J.P. Prince, who grew up in Memphis, and whose father, John, once worked as a Tigers assistant coach. "People have been saying we're soft, we don't bang, we don't want contact. We took that personally."

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Given the way the game began, it was odd that a slugger's statistic eventually was the difference. From the moment Calipari called a 30-second timeout just 35 seconds into the game until the moment the Vols' Duke Crews was fouled with 12:51 remaining in the first half, the teams went coast-to-coast making baskets, turnovers and highlights, scoring at a pace that translated to a 119-92 final.

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