Vanderbilt Men’s Basketball head coach Mark Byington — entering his first year at the helm of the program — took center stage this week to address the media at SEC Tipoff ‘25. The 2023-24 season marked a tumultuous one for the Commodores, who finished 13th in the SEC and failed to eclipse 10 wins (9-23) for the first time since 2020-21. The season resulted in all sorts of change on West End, as head coach Jerry Stackhouse was fired and nine players transferred out.
Enter Byington, the former head coach of James Madison University, who led the Dukes to a 32-4 record and a second-round NCAA Tournament appearance in the 2023-24 season. The jump from the Sun Belt Conference to the SEC is a steep one, but Byington won’t shy away from the challenge.
“The reason I’m at Vanderbilt and in this league is because it’s the best. There’s challenges and it [has] the best coaches [and] environments, and I want to be a part of that,” Byington said. “Right now we’re trying to build Vanderbilt [into] one of the better teams in the SEC and also the country. We know it’s a work in progress, but it’s something we’re excited about.”
Byington knows that the SEC — full of teams boasting highly-touted prospects and top players in all of college basketball — won’t be the only hardship his team will face.
“It’s a challenge when you’ve got to replace an entire roster. They’ve got to learn not only my system and my style; they’ve got to learn each other,” Byington said. “There’s a lot [that goes] into that. We’re better [now] than we were last week, [and] we’re better than we were two weeks [ago]. We’ll keep getting better along the way, and that’s why we don’t have to be at our best right now. Our goal is to keep getting better.”
Point guard AJ Hoggard, who was in Birmingham, Alabama, with Byington, offered some of his insight on the process of getting to know a brand-new team.
“It was a big adjustment for all of us,” Hoggard said. “I kind of had to grow in my own way and get to know these guys quicker than normal. It was good for all of us to get to understand each other and figure it out as we go.”
This level of change — Vanderbilt brought in 11 transfers to replace the nine it lost — is not unfamiliar territory in the current landscape of college athletics, and Byington knows that, too.
“It’s the nature of college athletics right now. [If] there’s a coaching change, the natural evolution is that guys [will] put their name in the transfer portal,” Byington said. “It did help us on the other end: If we didn’t have the transfer portal, we wouldn’t have a team right now.”
The emergence of the transfer portal, and its increased usage every year, has allowed programs like Vanderbilt to turn around and compete immediately.
“If I brought in a grad transfer and said, ‘Look, we’re going to build for the future,’ that’s unfair to them,” Byington said. “There is going to be a building process, but we’re not afforded that right now. We can’t make excuses right now and say that it’s gonna take time. We’ve got to try to be as good as we possibly can right now.”
The public hasn’t put a lot of faith into Vanderbilt’s program in this first year of Byington’s quasi-rebuild, and neither has the media. In fact, the Commodores were picked to finish dead last in the SEC in the Preseason Media Poll earlier this week. Byington, through all of his experience, won’t let that phase him.
“I just heard on the way down here this morning that we were picked last on the way down this morning,” Byington said. “This is my 12th year as a head coach, and I’ve been picked every single place possible. It’s not normally right, and there’s gonna be a lot of things decided between now and then. It’s not something that we are going to get caught up in.”
Byington also offered some insight into his fast-paced and high-octane offense that he’s picked up through coaching experience and by watching professional basketball, both domestically in the NBA and in international competitions.
“The first thing you’ll notice when you watch my team is the pace,” Byington said. “Right now, we’re probably playing faster than I ever have. At the same time, too, we’re gonna try to take care of the ball, get the right shot, play together [and] play the right way.”
He knows that the Commodores won’t have it easy in one of the country’s premier conferences.
“Everybody’s good. Everybody’s all-in and everybody’s committed,” Byington said. “You can sit here and run from it or you can try to embrace it and try to do the best you can.”
Vanderbilt Men’s Basketball will tip its season off in just over two weeks when it takes on the University of Maryland Eastern Shore on Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. CST.
