For the second straight season, Vanderbilt is off to a terrible start.
Thanks to three close home losses to USC, Kansas State and now Middle Tennessee, the Commodores need answers now.
At 3-6, the Commodores are the only SEC team with a losing record, and they have two more losses than any of their conference brethren.
Let that sink in. 3-6.
Even against a tough schedule, Vanderbilt has too many good players to have racked up six losses already. The ‘Dores can’t simply hope for a surge in SEC play like what it put together last year; head coach Bryce Drew’s team needs to start making headway now.
That made Wednesday’s home game against MTSU on Wednesday so important. It was about as much of a must-win game as you can get this time of year, and this was as much for the team’s psyche as for its resume.
For the sake of its resume, Vanderbilt needed a quality win. While a home win against MTSU was unlikely to stand out on the Commodores’ resume in March, the fact is Vanderbilt is now 0-5 against KenPom top-100 opponents. Vanderbilt does rank 301st nationally in KenPom’s Luck Rating, but forget the bad bounces — such an experienced team probably shouldn’t struggle so badly in close games in the first place.
“It’s a long season, and there are lots of ups and downs and adversity,” Drew said Tuesday. “We’re facing some adversity right now. If you look at who we’ve played after tomorrow, it’ll be three conference championship teams and four other teams [among which] three are ranked and one is almost ranked.”
While Drew’s point about the strength of schedule is undoubtedly true, Vanderbilt continues to lose to teams of a similar quality to what it will see every game in the SEC. All 14 SEC team rank inside KenPom’s top 100, which does mean Drew’s team will have plenty of chances for good wins down the line. But with how difficult the league is from top to bottom, starting 0-5 against quality opposition likely represents a hole too deep to dig out of when it comes to getting back in NCAA Tournament contention.
Additionally, it probably would have been healthier for the team to head into an 11-day break without the negative energy the frustrating loss to MTSU feeds. Despite this (or perhaps, strategically, because of it), Drew seemed surprisingly upbeat after the loss.
“It was a great college basketball game,” Drew said with a smile on his face to start his postgame press conference. “… I told our guys, I went in with my smile and said, ‘Hey, I’m proud of you guys.’ We played hard.”
Similarly, Jeff Roberson and Matthew Fisher-Davis were adamant after the loss that the team will start stringing wins together.
But without an obvious, take-charge leader among the players to ensure the team stays together and doesn’t get too down, this looks like danger time to me. This group has showed the propensity to spiral with a four-game losing streak last year, a 2-6 stretch midway through 2015-16, and the infamous seven-game slide in January 2015.
Admittedly, each of those three teams bounced back and salvaged their seasons to varying degrees. At this point, it might be naive to assume this group will do the same.
But if nothing else, Drew and the players are still publicly displaying confidence.
“They’re working. There could be a lot of finger pointing, a lot of quit,” Drew said. “Some of the games we could have quit; like the Kansas State game was a game we could’ve quit. The guys really got them back, and we had a chance to win that game. If we win that game and the USC game, both of which were basically one- or two-possession swings, we’re in a lot different situation now.”