Vanderbilt Basketball is The SEC's Best Team Right Now, And It's Not That Hard to See; Column
In this story:
NASHVILLE—It appears that Vanderbilt basketball didn’t get the memo.
Just about everyone in the SEC has gotten worse relative to where it was a year ago. Perhaps it’s unfair to the league to call it down as a result of it being historically good a year ago, but it certainly isn’t at the same level it was a year ago. In reality, it’s probably the third-best league in the country these days despite having the highest NET ranking of its average team of any league.
Florida has taken an inevitable step back after it ran out an all-time great roster a year ago. Auburn lost Johni Broome, Miles Kelly and Dylan Cardwell. Kentucky has had more growing pains than should be acceptable with the sport’s most expensive roster. Missouri is on a three-game power-five losing streak and has real perimeter shooting issues. Mississippi State has faded into obscurity.
Yet, Vanderbilt is better than it was when it got bounced in the round of 64 or when it entered SEC play last season. It appears to be significantly better. People are noticing, too. If they aren’t, then they haven’t watched or read enough.
If they haven’t noticed, they haven’t given the SEC’s best team its proper due.
Who knows how it all shakes out once the grind of league play comes–it appears as if Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington has built his deep roster for that, too—but as Vanderbilt’s players went home for their Christmas break, they were nearly inarguably the best team in a league that they sat in the middle of the pack of a season ago. Perhaps it would’ve been a two-horse race if Arkansas picked up a signature win against Houston over the weekend, but it isn’t. This is Vanderbilt and then everyone else, for now.
Vanderbilt has the highest KenPom efficiency rating in the league, the best projected record by KenPom, is the highest-ranked SEC team in the NET Rankings by over 10 spots and is the league’s highest-ranked team in the AP Top 25.
At this stage, Vanderbilt is a difficult team to evaluate in a sense because of its favorable roster build boiling into preseason biases of metrics and its lack of a quad 1A win. It’s not entirely unknown like some perceive it to be, though. Vanderbilt leads the SEC in upper-quad wins with six, has boat raced every power-five team that’s come in its path and has two solid road wins. The idea that it isn’t what it believes it is has motivated it, too.
"Our guys kind of heard some things. People were doubting us a little bit,” Byington said in his postgame radio hit after the Commodores’ blowout win over Wake Forest. “My guys were ready to play today. Credit to them. It was fun to coach them.”
Perhaps Byington’s record-setting James Madison team–which beat Wisconsin in the NCAA Tournament–still accounts for the most fun ride a team has taken him on, but this one appears to have everything it needs to pass that group. It demonstrated as much–and that it should be taken seriously–in the week prior to its break.
Wednesday in Memphis it won ugly and demonstrated that it is already player led as Tyler Nickel, Tyler Tanner and Duke Miles led a pre-overtime huddle prior to Vanderbilt blitzing Memphis in a session of free basketball. That night demonstrated this group’s staying power and that it’s made of the right things. Sunday in Winston Salem demonstrated that Byington’s team is as dynamic as he thinks it is as it went for 98 points in a game that felt flawless offensively.
Pair those outings with an MTE win in Atlantis–which saw Vanderbilt control the game against a Saint Mary’s team that is the antithesis of what Byington has built schematically–and the narrative that this group hasn’t had to show much of anything through 13 games appears to be futile. Perhaps teams in the league have more impressive wins, a number of them certainly do, but none have a body of work as encouraging as the one Vanderbilt has put together.
This group of veterans–which ranks eighth in the country in Division-I experience–appears to believe that they have something special enough that being the best SEC team at Christmas won’t be its most notable achievement.
“We’re trying to get to the end goal and March,” Miles said, “To be out there playing for a national championship, so that’s the main goal.”
Vanderbilt won’t know how close it’s going to come to that goal until a few months from now, but it’s got enough proof of concept to indicate that it can take this thing further than most outside the Huber Center appeared to believe it could prior to the season.
Byington has a number of good, old guards that can get their own, defend and can play up tempo the way he wants to. His group is bigger and more physical than it was a year ago. It’s got better shooting than it did a season ago, as well. Its only question mark appears to pertain to its physicality inside, and it also appears to be improved there.
The metrics and basketball nerds are all in on the way Vanderbilt plays. So are the counting stats and the eye test. Maybe the narrative hasn’t come all the way around on this Vanderbilt team yet, maybe it won’t end the season as the SEC’s best team. For now it is, though. And, no, we're not living in an alternate reality.
Take it in, folks.
_(1)-b3e453dfe426b2dd4b83a12540ebdb37.jpeg "Joey Dwyer")
Joey Dwyer is the lead writer on Vanderbilt Commodores On SI. He found his first love in college sports at nearby Lipscomb University and decided to make a career of telling its best stories. He got his start doing a Notre Dame basketball podcast from his basement as a 14-year-old during COVID and has since aimed to make that 14-year-old proud. Dwyer has covered Vanderbilt sports for three years and previously worked for 247 Sports and Rivals. He contributes to Seth Davis' Hoops HQ, Southeastern 16 and Mainstreet Nashville.
Follow joey_dwy