Time For Vanderbilt Basketball To Get Right; Column

NASHVILLE—Time for this program, this team to right the ship before it lets three losses turn to four. Time for this group to make sure that this streak doesn’t alter the course of the ride that it’s been on since November.

What happened to this group on Tuesday in Fayetteville was "embarrassing," Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington admits. It was the type of performance that prompted him to want to make changes. A performance like Byington's team turned in throughout its 93-68 loss to Arkansas even left him needing to process before he found an outline to improvement.

“It’s too quick for me to tell you everything, I’m not trying to dodge the question,” Byington told Vanderbilt play-by-play announcer Kevin Ingram in his postgame radio interview. “I’ve gotta watch the film on the way back and it’s going to be a hard film session.”

Who knows what Byington ultimately found–and it was likely more intricate than a general observer would grasp–but he knows the reality as well as anyone. This group needs to find its way into a win as it travels to Starkville over the weekend. It needs to get this thing right. Even if everything isn’t fixed, it needs something to happen for it so that it can focus on what it has going for it rather than what it doesn’t.

The results of that film session have yet to be seen or spoken publicly about, but it likely had plenty to do with Vanderbilt’s defensive lapses, timidity around the basket and inevitably included something about rebounding.

Vanderbilt’s 16-3 record wouldn’t indicate it, but these days it has some significant issues that it has to work through if it’s going to end up being included in the SEC regular season championship race.

At this point, Vanderbilt likely is what it is in some ways. The Tyler Tanner, Duke Miles backcourt is one of the SEC’s best and gives this group a chance in any game. With Byington at the helm, they’ll also run actions that will make this group a tough cover. The elephant in the room remains this group’s lack of a true interior presence and its ranking as the least efficient in the league throughout SEC play.

As a result of the skid that Vanderbilt is on these days, the final sentence in that paragraph is seemingly the only one that’s been talked about since this group went to Texas and lost a few weeks ago.

“That’s the type of performance where you want to make changes as a coach,” Byington said after Vanderbilt's loss to Arkansas. “I didn't do a good job prepping them. We came into the game with the wrong mentality.”

There’s some oddity in regard to its defense these days that indicates that there may be a fix here. Vanderbilt is last in the league in efficiency. But, its peripheral numbers indicate that it’s better than it’s shown. Vanderbilt is 11th in the league in steals–which will likely change once it gets its best point of attack defender back, potentially on Saturday, in Frankie Collins–seventh in blocked shots, fourth in opponent two-point shot distance, seventh in opponent turnover percentage and eighth in defensive rebounding. All of those are average to slightly below average metrics. Yet, right now Vanderbilt can’t seem to stop shots from going in for one reason or another.

Vanderbilt’s rebounding and general interior issues appear to be less fixable and are something that this group will have to live with moving forward. A Saturday win over Mississippi State won’t change anything long term in regard to the makeup of this team, but it will put the attention back on what it does have rather than what it doesn’t.

Time for this team to remember that and forget what’s happened since it got on the plane to go to Austin.

“Just a short-term memory,” Tanner said in regard to what it’s going to take to get this thing right again on Saturday. “We're gonna lose games, it’s gonna happen in the SEC. So, I mean, we're gonna learn from this, but we're not gonna harp on the negatives or anything.  We're just gonna try to get better and come back.”

Time to see if it can.