Vanderbilt Basketball Opens As Favorites Over Wake Forest

Vanderbilt basketball opens as a 4.5-point favorite as it travels to Winston Salem for its final power-five non-conference game against Wake Forest.

Wake Forest is 9-3 with two of its losses coming by one point to No. 1 Michigan and to Texas Tech, yet oddsmakers are high on Vanderbilt and its chances to take down what appears to be Steve Forbes’ best team since taking over the Demon Deacons.

Vanderbilt is coming off of an overtime win against Memphis in which it shot under 35% from the field and turned it over a season-high 20 times, but learned something valuable about itself. The Commodores rallied behind a player-led meeting prior to overtime and won a road game without its best performance.

“I told the guys ‘we should have some confidence in knowing that we can have an off shooting night,” Byington said. “We might not play perfect and some things might go against us, but we can still find a way to come out on top and have things go in our favor. We missed some open shots tonight, we got a little bit rattled, we did some things. But, we stayed competitive.”

Vanderbilt has put itself among the nation’s elite as a result of its 11-0 start to the season that includes wins over the Tigers, SMU, Saint Mary’s, VCU, UCF, Western Kentucky and four buy-game opponents. The Commodores’ rèsumè is among the strongest in all of college basketball as a result of their upper-quad wins as well as their drastic margin of victory in non-power five games.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Vanderbilt guard Duke Miles said after the Commodores’ Battle 4 Atlantis win over Saint Mary’s . “We’re trying to get to the end goal and March to be out there playing for a national championship, so that’s the main goal.”

As Vanderbilt looks to take a leap in 2025-26–Byington’s second year at the helm–it does so with a roster including just three returning scholarship players in Tyler Tanner, Devin McGlockton and Tyler Nickel. All three of which have significant roles on a team that possesses an eight-man transfer class headlined by TCU point guard Frankie Collins, North Carolina big man Jalen Washington, Washington wing Tyler Harris, Miles and Cornell wing AK Okereke.

Vanderbilt finished last season with its first NCAA Tournament berth since the 2016-17 season after a 20-win season, but this team has all the signs of being better than that one.

“The priority this recruiting season was to gain some more length, size,” Vanderbilt assistant coach Xavier Joyner told Vandy on SI over the summer. “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.”