Things never materialized this season for the Lady Vols in year two of the Kim Caldwell era. After a promising start to Caldwell’s tenure last season, Tennessee fell off a cliff over the last two months of the season.

It officially came to an end on Saturday evening in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Tennessee lost in the first round of the NCAA Tournament to NC State 76-61. But in reality, the season had a fork stuck in it long ago.

Caldwell was asked in her press conference following the Lady Vols’ loss about why the season never came together, and she gave an eyebrow-raising response about a supposed “Plan B” that resulted in a collapse during the season.

Kim Caldwell said pivoting to ‘Plan B’ resulted in a collapse for Tennessee from the top down

“Yeah, I think tried to get at that last time I was up here, but you can’t play this style of play and put in a plan B, and we put in a plan B, and I think when you do that, you lose your identity. You lose your buy in. You lose your staff a little bit. There’s falter from the top. That’s from me and I did that in the middle of the season. I know better than to do that and it was the worst year of my professional career. Our players deserved better than that from me and you learn from that going forward. You build with that, exactly like Coop (Talaysia Cooper) said. You build with that, people around you that know what we’re doing and are all in.”

Well, naturally, one would wonder as a result of that explanation: what in the world is the Plan B that Caldwell is talking about? She explained further when pressed.

“The plan B was when we stopped pressing. We stopped running, jumping. We keep players on the floor for a long time. We walk the ball up before we run sets, and then we do that in games sometimes after the first two minutes. Sometimes we do it in the third quarter. That’s why our third quarters look the way – we had it, right? We had another option. They knew we had another option. They knew if they didn’t get a couple stops here and there that we would go to that. They could be on the floor longer and that’s just not the way it works. There was never any clear leadership on my part of, ‘hey, this is exactly what we’re going to do, this is why we’re going to do it.’ We never got consistent rotations. That’s the first time in my year that we’ve never had players that consistently we know who is going to go in with which group. We just never got there.”

In other words, when the game plan shifted away from what brought Caldwell success and got her hired in the first place. And Caldwell saying “they knew we had another option” seems to indicate the players wanted to shift to Plan B and didn’t want to go with what Caldwell wants to do primarily. That appears to be the point the disconnect really started to take place and the team started to fall on hard times.

Caldwell’s coaching style calls for fast, frenetic, and pressurized chaos on the basketball court. Mass and frequent substitutions. It might not be Nolan Richardson’s “40 minutes of hell” from the 1990s, but it’s relatively unique in the women’s college game.

But it became crystal clear this year that there was a significant rift between some of the players on her roster and the coaching staff. The ugly losses. The talk by Caldwell of players having a lot of quit in them. A former player — Andraya Carter — saying the current players have no belief in the current system. The talk by players, including Nya Robertson saying the team “laid down a little too much”. This is years’ worth of odd public comments crammed into a two-month period.

Between those comments and shifting away from the game plan, Caldwell and her staff are going to have to work hard to get back to what made her so successful before coming to Knoxville and find players that are going to embrace and execute it at a high level.

Because when you can’t even run your own gameplan, things are already lost.