The honeymoon phase is over.
Head coach Mark Byington and Vanderbilt Men’s Basketball got off to a 13-1 start to the 2024-25 season — the team’s best since 2007-08 — but finally met their match throughout the opening week of SEC play.
A promising start to the new year saw the Commodores take down LSU on the road to open up conference play on Jan. 4. While LSU, ranked 71st in KenPom and 67th in the NET, isn’t exactly a top SEC team, the win still represented Byington’s first Quad I victory of the season. It also cemented the idea that Vanderbilt is ahead of schedule in Year One of the Byington era — a year that the SEC experts predicted it would finish dead last in the conference.
LSU was a quality win that let Vanderbilt dip its toes in SEC waters: Most importantly, though, it put Vanderbilt within the NCAA Tournament bubble for the first time all year.
Vanderbilt welcomed then-No. 14 Mississippi State into Memorial Gymnasium for its first home game of conference play, and the Commodore faithful, namely the students, did not disappoint. The student section was as full as it ever was during former head coach Jerry Stackhouse’s tenure, eager to see a tournament-quality team for the first time in eight years.
Vanderbilt students have answered the call. pic.twitter.com/W0w9Zf9jdU
— Aiden Rutman (@RutmanAiden) January 8, 2025
The Commodores’ carefully crafted bubble was put into a precarious position that evening as they were outplayed in every facet of the game, dropping to the Bulldogs, 76-64. The Black and Gold shot a dismal 35.5% from the field and 19.2% from deep in the loss. They used a 26-9 run throughout the middle part of the second half to crawl within five points but couldn’t close the door on a comeback.
Byington spoke on the performance after the game, acknowledging that his team still has plenty of work to do in the loaded SEC.
The loss didn’t completely burst the Vanderbubble — after all, Mississippi State is a top-20 team in the country per the AP Poll, the NET and KenPom. However, Vanderbilt’s next loss to Missouri did.
The Commodores dug themselves into a double-digit deficit for the second game in a row — one they could not claw out of. Let me be clear: Vanderbilt’s bubble is more than repairable. There are still fifteen regular season games and an SEC tournament for the Commodores to boost their resume, but their margin for error has shrunk significantly.
7-Eleven
Why has that margin for error shrunk so much?
The SEC is — to put it mildly — stacked. The conference has nine teams in the AP Poll’s Top 25, and five of those teams are inside the top 10.
Let’s take a look at Vanderbilt’s upcoming schedule. Seven of its next 11 games come against those five teams ranked inside the top 10 of the AP Poll. Over the next six weeks, the Commodores will play No. 6 Tennessee twice, No. 8 Kentucky twice along with No. 1 Auburn, No. 4 Alabama and No. 5 Florida. Four of those games will come on the road.
Vanderbilt will also play Oklahoma (just outside of the top 25) on the road and No. 21 Ole Miss at home.
The conference’s historic nature goes beyond just its nine best teams, though. The SEC has 15 teams inside the Top 75 of the NET rankings, with No. 90 South Carolina representing the only team on the outside. The conference won a staggering 88.9% of its nonconference games, and all 16 teams entered conference play with a .750 winning percentage, the first time every team in a conference had done so since 1983.
Translation? This might just be the best conference in the history of NCAA Men’s Basketball. There is no such thing as a “free win” in the 2025 SEC.
Even Vanderbilt’s two unranked opponents over this grueling 11-game stretch — South Carolina and Texas — have shown that they are not to be taken lightly. South Carolina very nearly upset No. __ Auburn on Jan. 11 before Texas took No. ___ Tennessee down to the wire in Austin just hours later.
A lot of the top teams in the SEC will get the benefit of the doubt for playing in such a difficult conference. The expectation right now is that there will be 12 to 13 SEC squads that qualify for the NCAA Tournament, meaning that a team could go 7-11 during conference play and likely secure a bid. To put it into perspective: Vanderbilt went 11-7 in the SEC and won two SEC Tournament games in 2022-23 and wasn’t even close to making the big dance.
That doesn’t mean that Vanderbilt can’t make the tournament — it realistically needs to win about half of its remaining games and perform well at Bridgestone Arena when the SEC Tournament begins. While that isn’t overly demanding, I’d encourage Commodore Nation to temper expectations and not get caught up in the weeds of March Madness.
This team wasn’t expected to touch the postseason in Year One of the Byington era. The fact that it’s even a discussion with a roster full of transfers — a roster missing a center, I might add — is a massive win for Vanderbilt.
Buying-in
Byington is a fantastic basketball coach. He’s done more this year with a group of rag-tag players than Stackhouse could with a carefully constructed roster of recruits and transfers. He deserves all the credit in the world for that.
Let’s talk about where he’s excelled thus far, despite the losing streak.
He’s turned Jason Edwards into an electric scorer. Edwards came in from North Texas after averaging 19.1 points per game, but there were still questions about his ability to do it at the SEC level.
He dropped 20 points against Missouri and was often Vanderbilt’s only spark on offense during a number of scoring lulls in Columbia. He might have had a disastrous night against Mississippi State (0-for-8 on field goals and 0 points) but most of that can be chalked up to a leg injury he suffered against LSU. He was a game-time decision and “begged to play.”
“I probably should’ve held him out tonight. He wanted to play,” Byington said. “He begged to play.”
Tyler Tanner’s development has continued through SEC play, and even though he committed his first turnover of the season against Missouri, there’s a lot to like about the young guard. Byington’s ability to retain Tanner — a Stackhouse recruit — when he took over in April was his first true recruiting victory. Tanner’s quick success speaks wonders about what Byington’s done with the program.
Vanderbilt has done a fantastic job forcing turnovers all season, and that hasn’t changed as the competition has gotten tougher. It still ranks first in the SEC in steals per game (10.3) and third in the conference in non-steal turnover percentage (7.9%). For a team that has the least size in the SEC — no player over 6’8 — the Commodores have impressed on both the offensive and defensive glass. Through three games of conference play, they rank fifth in offensive rebound rate at 36.8% and have outrebounded two of their three opponents. Rebounding was projected as an issue for this group, but Devin McGlockton, Jaylen Carey and Vanderbilt’s other 13 point guards have stepped up.
For all of those wins, though, the Commodores have some glaring issues that have been completely exposed in conference play.
Bought out
Vanderbilt’s successes from downtown have come too few and far between. The ‘Dores are shooting a dismal 32.9% from downtown — 12th in the SEC — and that number has dropped to 30% since the start of conference play. Byington’s teams are predicated on quick offenses that get up plenty of shots, and the Commodores haven’t shied away from letting triples fly (they rank sixth in the SEC at 25.6 attempts per game).
Outside of Edwards and Tyler Nickel, though, this team doesn’t have the personnel to keep letting shots fly with reckless abandon. Those two are at 36.5% and 37.1% from downtown on the season, respectively, but many of the team’s other scoring contributors have struggled to knock down shots consistently. MJ Collins Jr. (32.7%), AJ Hoggard (31.3%), Grant Huffman (31.3%), Chris Manon (25.0%) and Tanner (28.9%) play big minutes and have had hot shooting nights, but not consistently.
The efficiency woes continue as the team moves closer and closer to the basket — its 46.3% conversion rate on 2-point field goals in conference play ranks 13th in the SEC, per KenPom. Byington’s bigs have found a way to overcome their size deficits when it comes to grabbing boards, but not getting the ball into the basket.
Carey has shown flashes of brilliance, especially when it comes to getting to the hoop, but many of his attempts clang off of the rim harmlessly. McGlockton (72.6%) and Tanner (72.7%) have been the team’s saving graces inside, but if Vanderbilt wants to get back to scoring 90-plus points, Carey will have to improve on his 48.7% 2-point shooting clip.
Vanderbilt ranks 15th in all of Division I in turnover rate (14.2%), a deceptively low number that got slightly deflated thanks to a string of bottom-feeder opponents throughout the nonconference. In three conference games, the Commodores have turned the ball over 17.8% of the time, tenth in the SEC. That isn’t an overly alarming number, but for a team that took care of the ball so well in November and December, it isn’t a good trend.
Byington’s crew turned the ball over just nine times in its win over LSU. That number shot up to 13 and 14 in losses at the hands of Mississippi State and Missouri, respectively. Vanderbilt has found success this season when it has won the turnover battle and shot efficiently. Through three SEC games, it just hasn’t done that.
There’s plenty of time to right the ship, but SEC waters won’t get any smoother as the Black and Gold prepare for the seventh-hardest remaining schedule in the country.
Vanderbilt’s journey toward rebuilding its bubble will begin with a home date against South Carolina on Jan. 15, at 5:00 p.m. CST.