The fish problem

In the early-mid-1960s, Clyde Lee was the greatest prep basketball player in Nashville. He was choosing between Vanderbilt and David Lipscomb for college, and was advised that he needed to decide whether he wanted to be a big fish in a little pond (at Lipscomb) or a little fish in a big pond (at Vanderbilt).  He chose Vanderbilt and only became the greatest player in the history of the program (barring neither Adcock, Perdue, McCaffery, Byers, Foster, Jenkins, Ezili nor Taylor). 

This came to my mind during the furore about Vanderbilt getting out of its Big Ten games next year.  We’re merely doing what the rest of the league did long ago: pull up the ladders and schedule only chum for out-of-conference games (barring rivalries OOC, something that seems to be an SEC East-only phenomenon), on the pretext that the SEC is so difficult to navigate that we don’t need anything else to improve our strength of schedule.  Personally, I question this for a team like Florida or Alabama (not to deny Alabama credit for the Saban-era practice of a marquee opponent in a neutral-site season opener), but for a team like Ole Miss or Kentucky or Vanderbilt, the notion that we’re wimping out if we don’t stack another big-ticket foe on top of three top-10 opponents in-conference doesn’t deserve the dignity of a reply, especially to programs that won’t face a ranked opponent all year.

This is the fish problem, and it’s one that Vanderbilt has struggled with in football for fifty years.  We’re a contender and a title winner in the conference in almost every other sport we play (baseball and men’s basketball both played in the conference title game last year, the hoopsters won it, and the women have multiple SECT titles on the mantle in the last decade, plus women’s cross-country won the SEC last year).  But as I’ve said before, over and over, the SEC is about exactly one thing, and it’s the one thing we as a university do worse than anything else.

The talk comes up periodically about how we should be traded to the ACC for Florida State, or Clemson, or maybe even move to the Big Ten (there was some talk about Vanderbilt as a possible 12th before Nebraska made the move) and across the board, it looks more suitable.  Better academics in both, basketball first in the ACC, the possibility of a Rose Bowl berth in the Big Ten.  And while it’s true that we’re not that good at the SEC’s one thing, is that a reason to pull out when everything else is first-class?

Maybe. But before we do, I’d say it’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to compete without compromising ourselves.  Keep going to class, keep graduating players, keep off probation, keep away from NCAA sanctions. But there’s no need to try to out-schedule everyone else, to get by on older facilities, to avoid making a play for the best recruits.  And yet it’s possible we may never grow big enough for the pond.

This is something I wrestle with myself from time to time. The single biggest mistake of my life was in where I went to undergrad. Had I left the state and been exposed to the wider world, maybe I would have grown to fit the pond. Instead, I went to a place that specialized in fitting you for a life in the small pond.  And when I finally did leave, it was with my growth stunted in a way I never really recovered from.

The question I have to ask myself is – could I have been happy as the tallest dwarf in the circus? Would I have strained against the constraints of a more circumscribed life?  And the answer is: I wasn’t. And I did.

Would Vanderbilt football be a happier place to be if we were playing in a conference of, say – Rice, SMU, Tulane, Army, Navy, and hell, maybe Wake Forest and Notre Dame? I don’t know. Is the Ivy League happy playing I-AA ball with no postseason?  Can you elect to step out of the big pond and find one just right?

Something to think about going forward. Because even though we’re going to do everything in our power to be an SEC school without compromising who we are, it occurs to me that we might not get away with this one.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.