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By Neil Blackmon
Published:
NASHVILLE — Vanderbilt heard all the criticisms.
“They are just too small to play with elite teams,” opined a national podcaster.
“You simply cannot trust them to rebound and compete physically with the best teams come March,” penned a national writer.
“Vanderbilt’s a great story, but are they really second weekend of the NCAA Tournament good without a frontcourt?” another national radio host asked.
And that’s just in the last month, even as Mark Byington’s team earned a double-bye and top-4 SEC finish, winning its most games since 2012, which, potentially not so coincidentally, is the last time Vanderbilt played on Sunday at the SEC Tournament.
(Of course, Sunday didn’t go the way Vanderbilt would have liked, as the Commodores fell to Arkansas in the title game. Still, the Commodores are entering the NCAA Tournament with a lot of momentum.)
All season long, the focus on what Vanderbilt presumably couldn’t do overwhelmed a fair accounting of all this tremendous basketball team can do.
Until Saturday.
That’s when Vanderbilt took every criticism of its basketball team and flipped them on their head, routing the big, bad, “too big, too physical” reigning national champion Florida Gators 91-74 in the SEC Tournament semifinals.
Sure, Vanderbilt was out-rebounded 38-23 and outscored 36-30 in the paint. But that’s kind of the point, right? Vanderbilt can beat you anyway. That’s how good the Commodores are in every other facet of basketball.
The Commodores were the faster, quicker, hungrier, and better prepared basketball team on Saturday, and it showed from the first possession, when a ball reversal and hard Devin McGlockton drive led to a kick out and wide open Tyler Tanner 3 that hit nothing but the bottom. 3-0 Vanderbilt. The Gators would wrest the lead back briefly, but after one Florida counterpunch, the Commodores rolled, using an 11-0 “kill shot” run to gain separation and ballooning the lead to as much as 25 points before Florida chipped helplessly away late.
Florida won the national championship a season ago and the SEC regular season championship this season by winning at the margins and playing with greater effort, hustle, and passion than almost any team in its path.
Not Saturday. Vanderbilt won almost every 50-50 ball, contested every Florida shot in the paint, and played physical, gritty defense, trapping and blitzing Florida ball screens and hassling every Florida dribble hand off and pass.
Criticized all year for a lack of size and physicality inside, Vanderbilt forced the Gators into 10 missed layups and just a 50% field goal percentage at the rim, well below Florida’s season average of 68.8%, which leads the SEC, per CBB Analytics.
In opening a 15-point lead at intermission, Vanderbilt scored 20 points off 9 first half Florida turnovers, allowing the Commodores to collect easy points and neutralize Florida’s tenacious halfcourt defense, which helped the Gators rattle off 12-consecutive wins until Saturday’s bludgeoning.
Tyler Tanner and Duke Miles, Vanderbilt’s starting guards, grabbed 3 steals apiece and helped Vanderbilt outscore Florida 24-8 off turnovers on the afternoon, a 16-point margin that nearly mirrored the 17-point margin of victory. Tanner’s ability to blow up Florida’s dribble-handoff actions frustrated Florida’s ability to build any offensive rhythm, and the Gators never got closer than 10 points in the second half.
“We knew we had to go beat them. They weren’t going to give us anything, and we went on and did that. Our guys went out from start to finish and played physical, played fearless, played the right way, played team basketball. So many guys stepped up and that’s what you need to beat a good team,” Byington told the gathered media after the win.
Byington’s praise for his team’s physicality was echoed by Florida head coach Todd Golden, who praised the way Byington’s team both bucked Florida’s scout and executed its own.
“Vandy did a good job being physical, for sure,” Golden said following the defeat. “I think they knocked us off our spots. When we get 20 offensive rebounds, in theory we should be scoring 25 or even a bucket more on that. We only had 14 second-chance points.”
On the other end, Florida was willing to live with a few open 3-point shots for Vanderbilt — as long as it wasn’t sharpshooters like Tanner, Miles, and wing Tyler Nickel taking them. The Gators did that, limiting Nickel, Miles, and Tanner to a 3-for-10 shooting performance from deep. The only problem, as Byington alluded to, was that the Commodores had other guys step up.
Jalen Washington made a 3-pointer. McGlockton buried a season-high 3 from deep. AK Okereke also shot a season-best 3-for-5 from beyond the arc. Florida dared Vanderbilt’s bigs to shoot, and the Commodores anchored down and delivered. What’s more, Vanderbilt’s bench outscored Florida’s celebrated bench 26-8, buoyed by 17 from Washington and a tough man 7 from Chandler Bing, who made each of his field goals through contact or over length.
All year, the questions around Vanderbilt revolved around height, physicality, and toughness. Florida is consistently one of the biggest toughness challenges in the sport.
Challenge accepted. Statement made.
On Sunday, the Commodores failed to finish the job against an Arkansas team that, like Florida, won the only regular-season meeting between the 2 programs.
Darius Acuff Jr., Trevon Brazile, Meleek Thomas and Billy Richmond III led the way for John Calipari’s Hog squad, winning 86-75.
But as Vanderbilt prepares to learn its fate in the NCAA Tournament bracket, the refrain remains the same.
Doubt the Commodores at your own risk.
Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
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