Takeaways From Vanderbilt Basketball's 80-64 Loss to Texas

The harsh road realities

Vanderbilt never claimed to be invincible or anything of the sort, but it had yet to be thwarted or pushed in an environment like it was in on Wednesday.

Mark Byington’s team has been on the road, but generally only experienced sleepy crowds and middling teams at South Carolina, UCF and Wake Forest. This was its biggest road test to date and it experienced what the road is like in a way that it hasn’t had to yet.

As Vanderbilt found out on Wednesday, opposing shots go in that normally don’t, veterans get sped up in ways they normally don’t and results can vary heavily when a road crowd is involved.

Chalk it up and move on.

Foul trouble was a big problem

By the six-minute mark of the first half, Jalen Washington and Devin McGlockton were both in foul trouble.

The foul problem being one that Vanderbilt struggled with in Austin was fitting on Wednesday as it faced the No. 1 team in the country at drawing them. It was too predictable, though.

It hasn’t been quite this drastic, but Vanderbilt has struggled often with similar issues throughout the course of the season–and perhaps more than Byington anticipated as he built this roster. Washington’s 2.3 fouls per game matched his average at North Carolina last season–albeit, he was playing more minutes per game at Vanderbilt heading into Wednesday night–and McGlockton’s 3.3 average eclipsed his 3.0 per night.

Heading into Wednesday, McGlockton had recorded at least four fouls in five games, fouled out of one and recorded at least three fouls in eight additional games. Washington had four games in which he recorded at least four, fouled out of one and recorded three or more in four additional games.

Vanderbilt doesn’t appear to have many, but this appears to be a flaw. At the very least, it’s playing with guys who have worries about fouls in the back of their minds more often than they should.

Tyler Tanner kept it going

Tanner standing out and being a double-figure scorer is the most predictable thing about Vanderbilt basketball these days.

The sophomore guard has found himself squarely in the vicinity of stardom after the season’s start and catapulted his own stock with a week in which he was named SEC Player of the Week and the USBWA Player of the Week. Tanner didn’t stop there, though.

Before anyone else, Tanner was in double figures on Wednesday night and answered the moment of being one of the go-to guys in an SEC road game.

What’s real and what’s the road

The reason Vanderbilt’s foul trouble is significant coming out of Wednesday night is that it brings a trend to light that was previously covered up by the flair of Vanderbilt’s 16-0 start. That’s something it will have to address as it gets down the stretch of league play.

Vanderbilt’s 5-for-14 mark on layups, 36.7% shooting from the field and the gashing it got on the glass, however, is all stuff to take with a grain of salt these days. Consider Vanderbilt trailing for more time on Wednesday than it had previously all season in the same way.

Byington’s team has enough of a body of work to this point that it shouldn’t be evaluated in those areas only off of Wednesday, but it will have to continue to prove that Wednesday isn’t all that indicative of this group’s weaknesses.

The good news

Vanderbilt’s Wednesday night loss won’t haunt it on Selection Sunday or be a blip on its rèsumè when this is all said and done.

Texas will likely be a bubble team by the time this is all said and done and looks to have no problem staying in quad one. Meaning, this will be a quad-one loss for Vanderbilt.

That means that the metrics won’t be all that unkind to Vanderbilt once the initial sting wears off.