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.