Month: February 2012

That one hurts.  If we don’t spot them a 13 point lead at halftime…if we can shoot better than 65% from the free throw line…if we can have more than one guy off the bench scoring points (note: assuming John Jenkins turns pro, we got exactly zero points from players who will be back next season)…if we can hit a single shot in the last four minutes of the game…

I’m not going to kick about the officiating.  This is the SEC.  You get the calls if you’re Kentucky in basketball, or Alabama or Florida in football, and you just have to live with it.  It’s about what I expect, and I don’t expect it to ever get any better.  What’s more troubling to me is the fact that Kentucky will probably send most of the squad to the NBA again, and reload with Alex Poythress, among others – here we are with five seniors and a junior, four years of chemistry and teamwork and trying to make the best unit we can, and Kentucky can just go out and grab the best four or five high school players in the country, milk them for a year before they go to the NBA, and roll all over in the meantime.  I’ve said it before but it bears repeating – we’re not playing the same game, and that’s why it always seems like we’ve seen this movie before.  Over and over and over.

Five home losses.  I can’t remember the last time we lost five games at home.  We gave them everything we had, and it’s just not enough.  Just like Vandy football against Florida or Tennessee, like Cal against USC, like the Redskins against…well, everyone.  I don’t know why I even watch sports anymore…but I’m staring to grasp why there are so many bandwagoning sons of bitches out there.

Future Problem Solving, junior division, grades 4-6.  In 1984, my sixth grade “team” (really just four donks) competed in the three national problems and finished first in the nation in two of them, which meant we got to go to Coe College, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for the big national final competition.

The way it worked was this: you had a “fuzzy situation” – a description of some future concern like an orbital prison, or a vaccine for 12 different diseases, or things like that involving genetic engineering or what have you – and determine how to solve various issues associated with it.   I don’t remember the details or very much about it, because that was almost thirty years ago, and it’s beside the point.

The point is that was the first real trip.  That was the first time in living memory I had been outside the South (I was too young to remember the California trip at age 10 months).  It was my first time on an airplane.  First time changing planes in Chicago (O’Hare hasn’t changed much).  We were housed in dorms, with a huge lobby that had free soda and a huge screen playing MTV…which I had never seen before.  I must have seen the videos for “The Reflex” and “Legs” and the trailer for “Top Secret” about a thousand times in that week.

I don’t remember how we did – we certainly didn’t place in any exceptional fashion, because I would have remembered that.  Instead, I remember things like spending an inordinate amount of time working on Star Frontiers characters and modules – by 1984, it had completely displaced Dungeons & Dragons in the Young Gifted Nerd Role Playing Game rotation – and being intrigued by this new thing I’d never seen called “Dominos Pizza” where you called a phone number and they BROUGHT YOU A PIZZA.

And strangely enough, there was a dance.  Or mixer, or something – I don’t know what they called it exactly.  All I know is that there was music, and some people in Devo-esque trash bag getups, and I clearly remember thinking that something was definitely wrong and this event wasn’t working for me somehow.

And then, at the pancake restaurant in O’Hare on the flight back, I asked for hot tea and I got a mug and some sort of metal pitcher of hot water, and I was lost.

Different times.

There’s a lot of shit going on right now with Vanderbilt basketball.  My hammering of the hornets’ nest released a low-grade fug that everyone acknowledges was there all along, made worse by the whole “the future is now” problem.  It may not make sense to judge our coach on the thin sample size of tournament games in March, as some have objected, but the problem is that we have seven losses already – four of them at home, where we’re never supposed to lose.  It’s all well and good to say that winning twenty-some-odd games a year is worthwhile, but when we’re not winning, it’s not good enough to turn around and say that the postseason will redeem us…unless it does.

And ultimately, that’s the issue with a team like Vanderbilt.  You can win games in the regular season, you can have big upsets (four straight times we’ve knocked off a #1 team in the country, and six of nine all time – and don’t forget the five straight wins against top-25 foes in 2007), but they don’t hang banners for a Very Good Season.  Either you win the SEC regular-season crown (last accomplished in 1993) or you win the SEC tournament (last accomplished…1974?  Maybe?) or you do something impressive in March Madness.  I suppose you could run the table and win the NIT (1990) but that would be one hell of a letdown for a team that came into the preseason as a top-10 squad with rumblings of Final Four potential.

So in the end, you’ve got to win something.  Like baseball winning the regular season and the tournament in 2007 (before getting ignominiously dumped out by Michigan).  Like baseball winning the Super-Regional last year against an Oregon State squad that was inexplicably ranked above us for most of the season.  You need an accomplishment.

And for my sports teams, accomplishments have been tough to come by.  Cal did technically win a piece of the Pac-10 title in 2006 – and may be retroactive 2004 champs as well – but there was no Rose Bowl berth, so it hardly seems like an actual title.  Vanderbilt basketball’s shortcomings once the calendar hits March are well-documented in this space.  Vanderbilt football measured accomplishment mostly by whether they covered the spread on a top-25 foe, until this season – but nobody expects us to be challenging for the SEC championship and it would take a miracle on the order of turning water into Pappy Van Winkle 23-year-old bourbon.  And the Redskins last won a Super Bowl in 1991 – and have a total of three playoff appearances in the two decades since.  At least Celtic could be relied on for something every year – a league title, or some sort of cup – but that was my most tangential connection of all, and even that went by the boards once Gordon Strachan left the bench.  And as if to mock me deliberately, God has seen fit to grant Alabama not one but TWO national championships since I disavowed the Crimson Tide for anything but Auburn and Tennessee games.*

Which begs the question: why that?  Why not something more substantive?  How about getting Barack Obama in the White House?  Well yeah, that was awesome, but it was substantively ruined by Prop 8 the same night.  Passing the health-care bill?  That was a shitshow, a half-assed job made necessary by the incompetence of Harry Reid and the continuing effort of the Village and their amen corner on cable news to call a spade a fucking shovel.

Well, what about me?

I don’t talk much about work here, for obvious reasons – in Silicon Valley, blogging about your current job is what’s known as a career-limiting move – but when I took this one, I had a simple plan.  Year one – rookie of the year.  Year two – most improved player.  Year three – MVP.  Year four – The Wolf, a la ‘Er Indoors at her job. (Or me back in DC that last year, to be honest.)

Well, to cut a long story short, it happened.  About a month ago, I got called into the office and handed a letter containing an embarrassingly glowing review and a serious off-cycle raise, to the tune of almost 10%.  It would be tough to come up with a more convincing case that I nailed the year-three target dead center.  And I celebrated, sort of.  We all went to dinner and didn’t skimp on the booze, I bought myself a fine bottle of St George absinthe and an expensive new pair of jeans, and – as is traditional now for any pay increase – a new Nerf gun (the aforementioned Jolt-EX1, which goes in my bag everywhere my laptop goes now).

But it’s not the same.  Setting aside the years and years of humility bashed into my brain as a kid, it’s not the sort of thing where you wear the championship T-shirt around.  I don’t have the HOLY SHIT WHOOP ASS songs on the iPhone playlist a la Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” or Led Zep’s “Good Times Bad Times” or M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” that went along with previous Vanderbilt successes in recent years.

Why not, though?  Why not pick a couple of appropriately ebullient tracks to boom loud while throwing together the championship ensemble with the new jeans and the notional seersucker jacket** and hell, the Vandy Brooks Brothers button-up, and just swag out and enjoy the moment?  Well, for one, it doesn’t emotionally feel like that big a deal – it’s not something that you see your other fans for the next few months and fist-pump and cheer about.  And for another – the moment’s over.  Year four is underway and it’s a monster, and there’s no time for sitting around woofing about how great year three went.

All of this dovetails nicely with the upcoming birthday.  This isn’t the ancient world, where living to thirty-five made you a wizened old veteran – pretty much anybody can turn forty these days, happens all the time.  It’s sure not the sort of thing I’m going to go around being pumped about for months afterward, the way you tend to at sixteen or twenty-one.

Championships don’t come around that often, not even vicariously (unless you’re the Yankees, or Duke, or Manchester United, and looked at from that angle it’s no wonder they attract so many bandwagoning sons of bitches).  In the end you have to make your own championship. And celebrate accordingly.  And it all comes full circle back to the problem of seeking external validation.

It should be obvious by now that imaging a new PC is a long, slow, tedious, agonizing process that takes hours and leaves plenty of time to talk shite on the internet.

 

* Yes, the Giants, but even though that was a landmark World Series win in 2010, and I was happy, and the wife even went to the parade – it’s not like I was ever stuck into them the way I was with any of the other sports I mentioned, even Celtic.  I’ve been to maybe half a dozen games ever and I watch maybe two or three regular season games a year when I can be arsed, so I didn’t have the emotional investment that most of San Francisco had.

 

** Notional my ass, 30% off at Nordstrom.com.  I bought that shit.

So unless something huge changes between now and summer, the plan is still to ride out the existing contract on the iPhone and then go to a work-provided sixth-gen iPhone on Verizon, which would hopefully feature the ability to roam abroad on my own SIM.  While I wouldn’t object to a slightly larger viewable area, I sure as hell don’t want one of the twenty identical Android slabs I saw at Best Buy on Monday at lunchtime.  The fact that Samsung thinks they’re going to put the smack down on Apple with a 5″ tablet of the exact sort that Dell busted HARD trying to sell? Go back to running the photocopier, boys.  Enjoy your Blade/Blackjack/S3 or whatever.

After another couple days trying to use the iPad, I can again say – it’s definitely easier to type on than a 7″ tablet would be, and it’s easier to pull out of the bag for daily goofing off than would be a laptop.  But you’re back to the bag problem, and daily carry.  And a 7″ tablet is too small to type on or effectively use as a laptop replacement in any way…which in turn takes us back to the Kindle Fire, except it lacks the GPS navigation that I keep keying on as a prospective use for a notional tablet.

Maybe I just need to try to do the things I think I need an iPad for…on the iPhone.  Naturally it’s easier to read the Economist on the iPad, but it can be done on the phone without as much aggravation because you’re dealing with shorter-form text than you’d get from a book (which is why I still need the Kindle 3rd edition).  Maybe I need to try to hit that for RSS more often, but the lack of a touch interface (never mind the sluggish performance) is off-putting at best and unworkable at worst.

I need to be jotting down the things that I balk at using the iPhone for and seeing what the real-world use case is like for those things.  Then we’ll see how much I really need to be splashing out on some notional third-generation iPad.  Especially when I could throw that cash on a nice seersucker suit ;]

So let’s start off with the obvious: while the political world and its amen corner of useful dopes on cable news goes gaga over Rick Santorum’s trifecta last night, consider this: it means nothing.  The number of votes cast was amazingly low and no delegates are directly awarded from last night’s vote – and in the case of Missouri, no delegates are awarded at all; it’s a pure “beauty contest” resulting from a lack of preparation and understanding on the part of the Missouri GOP and the RNC.  Hell, Gingrich wasn’t even on the ballot in the Show-Me State.

So from a practical standpoint, this means nothing.  From a perceptual standpoint, it looks as if Romney has taken a torpedo again, although this one is unlikely to be below the waterline.  But it demonstrates that the appeal of Newt Gingrich outside the South will be limited at best, and that Santorum may yet be more attractive to evangelical voters outside Dixie than is Multiple-Choice Mitt.  Santorum is a True Believer(™) and those always do well in primaries and caucuses, because that’s when the people who really truly care all show up.

Inasmuch as this serves to stretch out the primary, it will probably only help the President – the last thing Romney needs is a continuing demonstration of how he hasn’t sold much of the GOP, and the last thing the GOP needs is more airtime for a candidate who is down on birth control, never mind abortion.  Rick Santorum is the sort of candidate who will drive those low-intensity suburban upper middle class voters screaming back to Obama.

I suppose I should touch on the Prop 8 ruling – there seems to be some debate about the legal reasoning and wording, mostly centered around the fact that the Ninth Circuit panel seems to have ruled based solely on the merits of whether the rights of a class can be restricted post facto and especially by referendum.  It’s an approach designed to limit the Supreme Court appeal – if the only constitutional issue is the ability to do what Prop 8 did, rather than the merits of Prop 8 or gay marriage, it’s entirely possibly the Court might not even grant cert. But never underestimate the willingness of this SCOTUS to make up the law out of whole cloth and do something stupid that we’ll all regret in two years.

Well, it looks like the Komen folks will have to change their slug line from “For the Cure” to “Not in the Face!” …I don’t envy their PR folks at this point.  It’s not an easy thing to try to un-piss the bed…Awkward time for Zeta Tau Alpha to be launching a chapter at Vanderbilt, seeing that Komen is (was?) their national philanthropy…

…The ACC is rolling out its new scheduling process, and will join the PAC-12 and B1G and Big IX in going to nine conference games.  Can the SEC be far behind?…it’s starting to become apparent how thoroughly untenable a 14-team league is for scheduling purposes; the ACC is following the SEC lead in scrapping divisions for ranking purposes but will use a modified form to try to make the expanded 18-game conference basketball schedule have some measure of continuity…if you didn’t believe that football-driven realignment would end up shit for all other collegiate sports, best believe now…

Meanwhile, the NFL continues its unique brand of bluster by expanding the Thursday night schedule to the entire season so that everyone has a shot at a prime-time game…on the NFL’s own house network which not every cable system gets, but which by rule must be carried over the air in the home market by someone…you think ESPN is happy about this after a couple decades of Thursday night college football?…if you need any more proof that the NFL thinks it’s the be-all and end-all of the sport of football, I don’t know what to tell you…doesn’t change the fact that the Super Bowl is still the football world’s equivalent of St Patrick’s Day: overhyped, full of amateurs, and brings out the worst of the genre, and is generally abhorrent to anyone who actually enjoys football or Irish-style drink…

…Apple refuses to be drawn on a release date for the iPad 3.  Or specs for the iPad 3.  Or the existence of an iPad 3.  I’m pretty sure that if it exists, and if I decide to get one, I’ll have to have “Dynabook” engraved on it somewhere…the fact that you can get Avid for it now kind of kicks in the bozack the whole notion of “the iPad’s just for consumption.” Let’s see somebody cut up HD video on a Kindle…

Team Black Swan is sending a detachment to Spain next week.  It’ll be interesting to see how many times they start trying to speak French before catching themselves…in fairness, I’ve been to Paris twice and both times I had to stop myself trying to stammer something in German to make myself understood…it’s not all us; the guy in the cellphone store in Bath thought my accent was Canadian, which I’m sure certain persons would find risible in the extreme (it is too, look it up…shout out to the second 02-02 movie there)…

Come to think of it, it’s hard for me to believe it’s been ten years since the first trip to Punxsutawney, but the more I think about everything that’s gone down since 2002 it’s more amazing to believe it’s been ONLY ten years…you don’t even need to have kids to know that as you get older, the days go slow but the years go fast…I’ve been calling myself forty in casual conversation since football season started but it’s going to be weird to know it’s for real…speaking of aging, why do I get the feeling that I’m going to be flashing back to the Jane Russell ads for 18-Hour Girdles from my early childhood when Madonna gets out there at halftime of the Super Bowl?  The last good Super Bowl halftime was U2, wait for it…ten years ago….

The average delta between high and low temps in Arlington, Virginia last week was between 15 and 20 degrees.  The average here was between 25 and 30 degrees…Da Wife will give me shit about it, but it’s annoying when you need a peacoat at 8 AM and shirtsleeves at 4 PM, and it’s a good way to end up leaving a pile of coats at the office….it’s like springtime without the pollen, which is sort of a blessing, but it rams home the fact that there are only two real seasons in Silicon Valley: Early Alabama April and Late Alabama April…

It’s a sure sign that I’m getting older that my great aspiration for Saturday is to sleep in as late as 9 or even 9:30, then get up and make coffee and pad around the house with basketball on in the background…if it’s true that I’d rather be 60 and acting 40 than 40 and acting 20, I’m getting a great head start on the former…and there’s your 850 words.  Don’t know how Herb did this day in and year out, but the man was a genius from a much more colorful age…

See you at the Washbag.

Well, like I always say, never poke a hornet’s nest with a stick when you can hit it with a baseball bat.

My post planting the flag for “time to change coaches” at Anchor of Gold is running up on 100 comments after being shifted to the front page yesterday morning and kicking off what I can only describe as a cathartic outburst from a lot of people, including several who are coming out of the woodwork to comment for the first time.  The whole thing has been remarkably civilized and has mostly been carried out on a higher level of intellect and maturity than “sports blog” normally implies, especially outside EDSBS, which I will take as a mark of the high quality of Vanderbilt fandom as a whole.  When we’re not raining tennis balls on Florida players, obviously.

The counterpoint has largely been led by Jason Fukuda, whose command of facts and figures and statistics about Commodore basketball is second to none and whose opinion deserves serious consideration. It would be patently unfair to frame the counter-argument as “You never had it so good,” but the general thrust of it is summed up as follows:

1) Good coaches are difficult to find.  Merely making a change is no guarantee that it will be for the better. There are cautionary tales everywhere, most recently Herb Sendek.

2) Our team generally outperforms its preseason rankings – we usually find ourself picked fifth or so in the six-team SEC East and usually wind up better than that – and the postseason disappointment is a product of expectations built during the season rather than in comparison to what was predicted at the start.

3) Our shortcomings this year are largely down to the absence of Festus Ezili, who was either out altogether or barely back and functional for four of our six losses.  Furthermore, three of those six losses are OT losses to top-15 years, a fourth to an Arkansas that is now 16-0 at home (and where Stallings has only one win as Vanderbilt coach) and a fifth to a Cleveland State team that will most likely win the Horizon League and be in the tournament.

4) We have hammered Alabama on the road, absolutely throttled Tennessee, won a tournament-style non-conference matchup against MTSU, won a huge road game against a ranked Marquette team that has stayed good, and are currently sitting on a 5-2 conference record and 16-6 overall.  Fes is back and close to as healthy as he’s going to be, Hendo is back to practice this week to give us another big body, the true freshmen are rounding into shape, and we still have senior experience and legit NBA talent.  Past performance is no guarantor of future prospects.

5) It’s not time to panic.  We have played arguably the toughest non-conference schedule in the country and done it shorthanded.  We have actually done well enough that we’ve gotten spoiled, and all our goals for the season are perfectly attainable at full strength.  This whole conversation will look foolish if we’re looking back on it from the Final Four.

 

All good points, and I find no fault with any of them.  I think they may be orthogonal to my arguments – the fact that we outperform our preseason expectations but then revert to the mean in March is an explanation but hardly an excuse – but it is certainly possible to build a case that Kevin Stallings is still fit for purpose with next year’s huge rebuilding job on the horizon.  I don’t think either case is conclusive, and I strongly suspect that the emotional impact of what happens in March will have a big effect on how people look at this question in the off-season.

I can tell you this, though: sweep the Vols, at least split with Florida and Kentucky, get to the SECT title game and win a Sweet Sixteen game, and all is forgiven.  Lose in the first round again, and you’re going to have a hard time convincing me that Kevin Stallings isn’t making a team add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Well, the most anticipated IPO in seven or eight years is finally going down.  Facebook has filed their S-1 prospectus and will attempt to raise $5 billion off their arrival on the stock market.

Personally, I think they’re a year or two late.  In Silicon Valley, there’s already a backlash, both against the constant molestation of privacy that Facebook has become famous for and against the company’s devaluation of “friend”.  And to be honest, part of it is just hipster-snob disdain for an entity that has, for all intents and purposes, become the Millenial-age version of AOL.

More importantly, though, social networking has not stood still.  Google, the one entity with as much to gain from social-network data-mining, has not only launched a rival in G+ but has gone all-in on integrating it with every aspect of Google services.  Meanwhile, picture-sharing has remained with Flickr first and foremost when it’s not being staffed out to app-based services like Instagram.  Foursquare remains the prime mover of location-based check-in services. And above everything hovers Twitter, with its dumb-simple 140-text-character model as the basis for all manner of functions.  I can go weeks without logging into Facebook or G+, and I have, but I have to forcibly shut off Internet access for the night to stay away from Twitter.

For those who have toiled in the vineyard in Palo Alto for the past eight years or however long, of course, this is the moment they’ve waited for, the chance to get liquid.  Hell, the state of California is already banking on capital gains and tax revenue from Facebook stockholders in their budget plans going forward, and it could be a non-trivial windfall.  Expect the price of homes to skyrocket in Silicon Valley as frustrated buyers run up against Facebook employees with fistfuls of cash.

But Om’s crew makes a good point too – Facebook is about as big as it can get.  I can think of maybe six people I know in the world under the age of 80 that aren’t on it.  Hell, if my mother is on Facebook (a huge part of the reason I’m not anymore), you’ve pretty much saturated the market.  The only way to monetize any further is to either go whole-hog into data mining or start charging admission.  Then again, I’m not sure how Twitter plans to make money either.  At some point, web advertising only works if you have the kind of supermassive scale that Google does.

But I’m already splitting up my action.  I have my own blog, hosted with a family member rather than a commercial provider, and he also handles my secure email.  I run my own backups through Time Machine with multiple redundancies. My social networking is scattered among Twitter and Tumblr and Foursquare and the names are orthogonal but the accounts are never connected, for the most part.  Can I be data-mined and my identity and content be stripped for parts?  Probably, but you’re going to have to work for it.

By and large, I think the days of easy milking are done.  So if the Facebook crowd wants to take the money and run, I can’t say I blame them.  I’d want to grab a Tesla Roadster while I could, too.

(cross-posted from Anchor of Gold)

Bright side first: We are 10-2 in our last 12 games, with only one of those losses coming in regulation (Arkansas, where we’ve won only once in the last seven or eight tries anyway), and our overall record shows that three of our six losses were against top-15 teams.  If you didn’t know anything about this Vanderbilt team, you’d think things are going pretty well.

But we know about this team.  More important, we know what we were ranked in the preseason.  We know how this team flamed out down the stretch for the last two years.  And we know this year was when things were going to be different. In 2011-12, more than ever before, it was possible to say “the future is now” because we know what comes next year: barring a miracle, this team will have no scholarship seniors and only two juniors, one of whom only got meaningful playing time for the first time all season in Tuesday’s loss at Arkansas.

It’s nobody’s fault that Fes got hurt.  It’s asinine that he was suspended, but the injury did for that anyway.  It’s nobody’s fault that Hendo was lost for the year and that we had to play with Stevie Thunder out of position for the first dozen games or so.  Maybe we’re just snakebit.

But for the first time, we have to seriously consider whether the problem isn’t at the end of the bench.

Here, then, is the bill of charges against Coach Kevin Stallings. J’accuse:

1) HE’S NOT COACHING WELL.  This would seem to be a tautology – the coach is doing a bad job because he’s not coaching well – but I’m sick and tired of hearing post-game remarks like “we had a number of guys that didn’t hold up their end of the bargain.”  You have five seniors.  If they have been playing together for four years and somehow still aren’t holding up their end of the bargain, it’s time to consider that it may not be on the players.  Setting aside the merits of throwing your team under the bus in the presser – again and again – the fact is that the starters on this team have been playing as a team for four seasons now.  If it’s going to happen, it should have happened by now – and if Stallings thinks it hasn’t, he has only one place to look for an explanation.

2) HE’S NOT RECRUITING WELL.  Again – barring a miraculous return by John Jenkins, we’re going to have six scholarships free for 2012-13.  Right now, my understanding is that we only have players for three of those slots.  You can say that they put all their chips on landing Alex Poythress, but I will say that even if he turns out to be Blake Griffin, Kevin Durant, Lebron James and Smarty Jones all rolled into one, he can only play one spot on the floor, and that doesn’t fill the other five spaces.  This team, bar Rod Odom and Kyle Fuller (assuming Kyle doesn’t transfer as has been rumored) will be composed entirely of freshmen and sophomores next season, and while next year is very likely going to be a dumpster fire for the ages, the season after that will need guys who can use that seasoning and trial by fire and be ready to go.  There’s a very real chance that we will put one scholarship senior on the floor in the next two seasons combined, and in a world where Kentucky can run one-and-done future NBA lottery picks out there every season, we need experienced talent.

3) HE’S NOT RESPONDING TO THE PRESSURE OF EXPECTATIONS.  Siena. Murray State. Richmond. And now, Indiana State. Names that are carved in flaming blood on the hearts of the Commodore faithful, names that get flung in our face as March approaches, names that are cited as everyone from ESPN pundits to the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES pencils us in for a first-round loss – correctly.  We landed a 6 seed in 2004 and 2007 and gritted and luck-boxed our way into the Sweet Sixteen twice.  We have since gotten two 4s and a 5 and been home by Friday night of the first weekend every time.  We get a spot in the polls and the wheels come off.  For a couple of years now, this team has blown double-digit leads against inferior competition and constantly left fans wincing and wondering where the next dagger was coming from.  How many teams have fans that constantly fret that they’d be better off unranked?  How many schools with three legit NBA prospects still feel like they have to sneak up on teams?

4) WE CAN DO BETTER.  James Franklin made an impact without ever coaching a game, just by changing the attitude around football from day one.  Tim Corbin put Vanderbilt baseball at the #1 spot for most of 2007 and last year delivered a College World Series berth at last.  Kevin Stallings, in the last three years, has managed to assemble the most talented and potential-laden Vanderbilt basketball squad since – when?  The Big Mac Attack?  The F-Troop?  Clyde Lee? – and delivered a team that struggles on the road, can’t seem to get over the hump of Florida or Kentucky, and now loses regularly at home to teams that end in “State.”

It’s been a good run.  It was a great turnaround after the VBK debacle.  It really looked promising for a while there, and it was fun to dream the big dream.  But in the end, the dream didn’t die because of the other SEC talent, or because players didn’t hold their end up, or because the lure of NBA prep school was too strong, or because of the curse of Jimmy Dykes, or because of the SEC Officiating Random Event Generator.  You could blame a game, or maybe a season, but not five years of deflation. For that, there’s only one explanation.

I know it was you, Kevin.  You broke my heart.