How Mark Byington Adjusted Roster Strategy in Second Offseason at Vanderbilt

As Mark Byington reflected on the 2024-25 season and evaluated where he wanted to go in the transfer portal, he realized how tired he was of standing on the sideline and watching his team fade down the stretch of games.

Byington doesn’t believe it was a result of a lack of effort, but he also isn’t hiding from the stretches of poor second-half play in SEC games that could’ve raised his team’s seed when it was all said and done.

The more it happened, the more Byington knew that he had a problem on his hands and that he had to fix it. As a result, he did all he could to negate his team’s issues in the transfer portal this spring.

“I thought our team would wear down in the second half of games last year and I thought that was our size disadvantage,” Byington told Vandy on SI. “There were some times where we could be hard nosed, we could be scrappy, we can kind of make up for things sometimes in the first half, and I think just the overall size might have worn us down a little bit. So identifying that part was a weakness with us, we got bigger, and at every position.”

When Vanderbilt was at its best, it was running a spaced out lineup that could play fast and positionless like Byington wanted. When it was at its worst often came in the second half of games and was a result of it being outmatched on the frontline or its two bigs–both of which were closer to natural four men than true SEC centers–getting themselves into foul trouble.

As Byington sat back and looked at a league that includes Florida–which Byington believes wants to play 6-foot-11 center Alex Condon somewhere else other than the five and Tennessee wanting to play three “good sized” guys in the frontcourt, he and his staff had to evolve their thinking.

“The priority this recruiting season was to gain some more length, size. We knew going into last year we were maybe the smallest team in the SEC regarding length, size so we wanted to upgrade that, which we did,” Vanderbilt assistant coach Xavier Joyner told Vandy on SI. “That was a priority, looking for some guys with length and also upgrading the shooting.”

Byington has always appeared to be off put by the notion that only size at the four and the five matters, he generally notes that wingspan and height at the other positions matter as well. His effusive praise of former Vanderbilt guard Grant Huffman being 6-foot-4 and a true point guard is an indicator of what he prioritized as he filled out his roster in the spring.

Vanderbilt projects to have just three rotation players under 6-foot-7 and plans to play 6-foot-8 Washington transfer Tyler Harris at the two. That’s something that excites Byington–who wanted his smaller roster to identify with a “positionless” mindset last offseason and now appears to want a similar mindset for his bigger group.

“There's gonna be times where you're gonna be seeing us play a 6-foot-7 or 6-foot-8 shooting guard this year, and we might be 6-foot-7, 6-foot-8 at our two, three and four position and then have 6-foot-10, 6-foot-11 on the inside. So we are gonna be bigger. We are gonna have to adjust our style a little bit and that's what I'm doing this summer is kind of tweaking and seeing what fits.”

Byington admits that the summer is one of his favorite times of the year in the workplace as a result of the opportunity it provides to teach and be hands on with his team rather than having to focus on retention and the business side of things, but when he refers to the experimentation he plans on, he is borderline giddy.

A conversation with Byington this time of year is essentially a look inside the turning wheels of his head and how he envisions using the roster he’s accumulated. Byington wants to see what he can do with guys like North Carolina transfer Jalen Washington and Washington transfer Tyler Harris, who have showcased pieces of their games in “spurts,” but now have the opportunity to expand their games at Vanderbilt.

If he and his staff didn’t believe they could do it, they wouldn’t have gotten them.

“We had to get longer and we had to get taller,” Vanderbilt assistant Rick Ray told Vandy on SI, “But, we don't didn't want to do that and just be longer and bigger, but lose our skill level and lose what made us successful this year on the court.”