Tennessee basketball has its two open exhibitions in the books ahead of the 2026-27 regular season, but both went horrifically. The Vols first lost to Xavier by 16 before getting routed at Duke by the score of 103-64 on Tuesday night in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

After the loss to the Blue Devils, there was another conversation among the team about what needs to change. The primary diagnosis isn’t much of a schematic or technical change in how they’re playing, though. It’s simply showing some fight.

Transfer forward Braedan Lue said that returning walk-ons Campbell Duncan and Gavin Paull and transfer contributors Dai Dai Ames and Christian Fermin were the loudest voices. They pointed to previous Tennessee teams and made a strong statement about their attitude on the court. Even in losses, they weren’t getting outworked.

“We’ve got to get tougher,” Lue said. “A lot of the past Tennessee teams, they said they lose a game, but they wouldn’t lose the fight. I feel like these last two exhibition games, we lost the fight. So, what I’ve been saying is getting tougher, keep showing up every day and keep showing everybody that keeps showing up that we’re going to keep buying into it. We want to get better. We’re not going to accept this.”

After the game, Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes said he liked some of those things he was hearing in the locker room. He thinks it’s fixable, though. To him, he sees a want to, it’s just a team that doesn’t know how yet.

“We haven’t been able to put the whole team together yet, but that is not what happened here,” Barnes said. “What happened here was, again, the first four minutes of the game we wanted to see if a group of guys that we thought could get things done early, then we didn’t defend the way we needed to. Didn’t attack the way we needed to attack with the force that we needed to.

“Do I think that our guys want to? I don’t think there’s any question. Do they know how yet? Absolutely not. That is up to me and our staff, we’ll get them there. We have talked about it a lot. We have. We have talked about it from Day 1 what it is going to take at the level we want to win at. Sometimes, it takes this then you will find out who you can really count on.”

Now, Tennessee returns to Knoxville to prepare for a closed-door exhibition on Saturday. Then, the Vols gear up for the real season opener on Nov. 3 against Wofford. Tipoff is set for 6 p.m. ET on SECN.