Look: when a team like Tennessee, whose NCAA Tournament prospects are quite slim, plays a team like Vanderbilt, who is 1-30 over their last 31 games against SEC competition, it is very, very hard to get excited for the game. Couple this with a 6:30 PM Eastern start time and, well, yeah. I’m already bored. Why don’t we talk about the history of Vanderbilt basketball?
For a significant portion of my life, it has felt like Vanderbilt was ahead of Tennessee in the sport of college basketball. This probably was reinforced by one specific run to the Sweet Sixteen in 2004, right in the midst of Tennessee’s Buzz Peterson error. The ‘Dores weren’t particularly great that year – they’d get demolished in the Sweet Sixteen by eventual champions Connecticut – but getting there in the first place is a good accomplishment. I think about how exciting it was at the time that a team from Tennessee could make it quite far in the sport’s biggest tournament and I get a little nostalgic.
This was before I learned to despise Vandy, obviously. At the same time as the peak Bruce Pearl years, Kevin Stallings took Vandy to relatively new heights: five NCAA Tournaments in six years, though none of their runs progressed past the Sweet Sixteen. I would estimate that my peak of despising Vanderbilt University wasn’t reached until a couple of years after this peak, but I did relish in picking against Vanderbilt in the 2008, 2010, and 2011 NCAA Tournaments. It was an aggressively mundane, nice experience.
I think there are different experiences you can have with Vanderbilt based on your age. For instance, maybe you have particularly strong feelings about the Eddie Fogler era, which ended after four seasons at Vanderbilt with a 28-6 team that lost in the Sweet Sixteen. Maybe you are a C.M. Newton truther. Perhaps you remember Roy Skinner. Now, none of those memories feel quite so close; all that’s left is the worst program in the SEC playing very bad basketball that’s more reminiscent of a mid-level SoCon squad.
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Stats by Will 