You are Locked-on Balls, your daily Tennessee Volunteers Podcast, part of the Locked-on

Podcast Network, your team every day.

Welcome into Locked-on Balls, your team every day.

My name is Josh Ward.

Thank you for being here today.

There's a lot to get to here over the next few segments of the show as I'll get to some Tennessee basketball.

The Vols have a game tonight. It's one that the Vols really have to win. And I'll go over why.

The idea of saying a game in January is something you have to win typically isn't right.

But I think we can point to a few games specifically and say, yeah, Tennessee just has to win those

games if it wants to accomplish

some of its goals, like trying to get to the NCAA tournament. Tennessee is still trying to do that.

It's one of the top 50 teams in the country right around there, and Tennessee's coming off a

performance where it did some good things against Kansas, but it didn't win the game. And the

competition's about to get tougher

within conference play. So the game tonight against Texas A&M is one that Tennessee should win,

and I think we'll win. But you'll hear from Rick Barnes coming up in just a few minutes talking

about what Tennessee still needs to do moving forward. Those younger players needing to be

maybe more prepared for these big games, like the one

this past weekend against Kansas. So that's coming up here in segment number one. In segment

number two, I'm going to talk more about Zach Evans, the five-star running back, who is really

difficult to, I think, try to figure out exactly where he stands, what's going on. There are a number

of schools that appear to be at least in play for a visit this upcoming weekend. Jesse Simonton of Allquest is going to

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