Tennessee Vols basketball coach Rick Barnes isn’t getting any younger.

That’s why retirement rumors pop up every year around Barnes. And they’ll continue to pop up until Barnes, who turns 72 in July, calls it a career.

Barnes is one of the few coaches in college sports that will get to go out on his terms. He’s earned that. And when he does eventually retire, it’ll be a huge loss for Vols fans — and college basketball fans in general. Barnes is a bridge to an era of college basketball that many of us grew up with — he battled Dean Smith in the 1990s, he coached against college basketball legends like Tim Duncan, Vince Carter, and Shane Battier, among a host of others. Barnes is a legend in every sense of the word, and there will be a void in college basketball when he finally hangs up the suit pullover for good.

But when the day comes for Barnes to call it a career, it sounds like Tennessee will have no trouble finding a replacement.

Insider says Tennessee is viewed as a top 10 job in the industry

Longtime Vols insider Tony Basilio shared some interesting insight this week on how the Tennessee basketball job is viewed, and he noted that several folks in the industry are “interested in what’s going to happen” with Barnes and UT.

“People are really interested in what’s going to happen with Tennessee,” said Basilio. “I’ll have a lot more to say about that in the next couple of weeks, but let me just tell you this: this Tennessee job, in the industry, is considered a top 10 job. There are a couple of openings that are getting ready to pay a lot of money, and there are a couple of coaches that are watching to see what happens here. Bruce Pearl and then Rick Barnes, they’ve turned the Tennessee basketball job into a monster.”

“One of the guys I talked to said — well, he called the job a monster — one of the reasons it’s a monster is that they’ve never been to a Final Four,” continued Basilio. “It makes the job more attractive. The money that you have to play with here, the high attendance figures — which makes it easy to recruit [because] you play in front of NBA crowds every night…The crowd that showed up on the six-inch snowfall day is emblematic of that. It’s just another feather in the cap of this.

“And I was told it’s easily one of the top 10 jobs in college basketball. Now, it doesn’t really make sense when you think about the history of the program, but it does make sense when you put it in modern parlance. There is real watching and waiting for what’s going to happen here.”

It’s certainly easy to see why the Tennessee job is attractive. The fan base is elite, the facilities are top notch, and there’s a commitment to winning from the athletic department. And as Basilio noted with his Final Four comments, there’s not a big program legacy that coaches have to live up to — a new coach can create that legacy by being the first to take the Vols to a Final Four.

For now, it’s Barnes’ program. And it should be his program until he decides it’s not. When that day comes, Tennessee will have plenty of quality coaches lining up to be the Vols’ next head basketball coach.

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