This space usually would be a game story for Lady Vols basketball, but an ice storm in North Mississippi wiped that out, so let’s focus on the latest polls instead.

Tennessee moved up Monday to No. 15 in the AP poll as voted by media. That is good for national exposure. The two important ones are the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) and Wins Above Bubble (WAB) – a new metric in 2026 for women’s basketball – and the Lady Vols are in good position there, too.

Side note, if you have a basketball fan in your orbit, that person likely knows what NET is. Ask if they know what it stands for, and maybe you can win a small bet.

The NET updates daily and Tennessee landed at No. 17 to start the week. The Lady Vols are No. 13 in WAB, which is updated every Monday. Both are a factor in postseason seeding by the NCAA selection committee, and Tennessee wants to be in that top 16 at seeds No. 1-4 to guarantee hosting the early rounds at home.

The NET examines who a team played, where it was played, how efficiently it was played and the end result. The WAB is an additional metric that doesn’t evaluate margin of victory or loss – casual observers have noticed that a large margin in a win seems to move the NET needle favorably even against overmatched opponents – but instead the quality of a team’s resume based on results. A detailed account of both can be read HERE.

The Lady Vols had planned to play Monday night at No. 18 Ole Miss, but ice has trapped Oxford in a frigid embrace with impassable roads and widespread power outages as trees snapped onto houses and over utility lines.

The SEC wisely postponed the game, so the Lady Vols never departed Tennessee on Sunday, in stark contrast to 2021 when the Lady Vols played at Texas A&M amid a winter storm warning that shuttered all nearby airports, had to check into a hotel in the Houston area without heat due to the ice storm that enveloped the ill-prepared Lone Star State and used the team bus to study, do classwork and have some warmth in the daytime during a nearly three-day adventure.

Alyssa Latham, right, congratulates freshman Jaida Civil. (Kate Luffman/Tennessee Athletics)

The game at Ole Miss will need to be made up for conference standings and seeding purposes, so it’s going to cram in all likelihood a Tuesday game into the schedule between Sunday and Thursday matchups, but that’s better than being stranded in Mississippi.

Speaking of standings, with Vanderbilt’s loss to South Carolina on Sunday, the Lady Vols are the only SEC team to be undefeated in conference play and atop the standings. Granted, the schedule takes a steep incline, and the Lady Vols still have to play the seven teams at No. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 – South Carolina, Vanderbilt, Texas, LSU, Ole Miss, Georgia and Oklahoma – with only two of those at home and five of them ranked above Tennessee in the top 25.

Next up is Mississippi State, which has a dynamic offense and has been giving SEC teams fits, this Thursday, Jan. 29, in Knoxville at 6:30 p.m. That is followed by a trip to No. 1 and undefeated UConn on Sunday, Feb. 1.

The Huskies play in a watered-down Big East – once one of the best women’s basketball conferences in the country with Notre Dame and Rutgers – through no fault of their own because of the seismic changes brought by college football realignment and won’t play a ranked team in conference play. By contrast, the SEC has 10 teams ranked in the top 25. Once again, if that series continues, it needs to move out of the SEC calendar and be played in November or December.

The postponed trip to Ole Miss gave the Lady Vols a little bit of respite to start the week, but the payment will come due in February. In the meantime, coach Kim Caldwell will continue to preach pay attention to the next opponent and don’t look ahead. Tennessee also will need its freshmen, who are coming of age, to continue their ascent.

“I think that they are playing hard,” Caldwell said. “I think it’s getting easier for them, so their comfort level, their threshold for discomfort is getting higher, and they’re being able to play through things better.”

Maria M. Cornelius, a senior writer/editor at MoxCar Marketing + Communications since 2013, started her journalism career at the Knoxville News Sentinel and began writing about the Lady Vols in 1998. In 2016, she published her first book, “The Final Season: The Perseverance of Pat Summitt,” through The University of Tennessee Press and a 10th anniversary edition will be released June 16, 2026.