An Exercise in Unproductivity: The Vanderbilt Basketball Mock Draft

Time to get the band back together. via farm1.static.flickr.com

With only one major sport still in action, things are winding down here at Anchor of Gold. You may have noticed through our coverage of mural painting or terrible ideas, but we're winding down as far as content goes thanks to summer's dearth of sports in Nashville. Baseball has been great to cover, but until the brutal awesomeness of the SEC and NCAA Tournaments hit us in three weeks, there's a limited amount of good Vandy stuff to talk about Monday-Thursday.

So rather than provide you with game-by-game updates of Steve Tchiengang's FIFA '11 schedule, we're going to try something new. A Vanderbilt basketball mock draft.

The premise is simple - constructing a basketball team filled with Vanderbilt's greatest players over the past century. Guys like Clyde Lee and Jan van Breda Kolff will get the chance to play alongside Shan Foster and Matt Freije on a fantasy roster. Rosters will have between 6-8 players (depending on participation) and be open to every player that's ever donned the black and gold. Ross Neltner? Eligible. Demarre Carroll? Available. John Amaechi? Sure, why not. The only limit to players is that you're getting them at their best season as a Commodore.

The draft is open to all AoG members (and signing up to SBNation and getting a user name is free and easy) so we'll be having the actual draft in the comments section of a dedicated post where Vandy fans can choose their squad round by round. How you pick your players and how they'd play together is up to you - four guard sets or traditional lineups are all equally useful for this exercise. Ideally, we'll get between 5-10 participants and draft lazily throughout weekdays. If we get too many players we might need to cap the draft (just to ensure that no one is stuck with Alex Gordon as their best player), but we'll cross that bridge if we get there.

Draft rules and potential ideas to declare a winner will come once we know what we're dealing with, so express your interest in the comments below and we'll get it kickstarted from there. Ideally, we'd like to start next week, but draft times will be flexible. 

This is a dry run. If this goes well, we'll set up a football draft to lead into Coach James Franklin's inaugural season and hopefully drum up some excitement for the Commodores. 

If you're interested and can carve out 5-10 minutes during the day to sort through some Commodore greats and pick a team filled with the greatest players to wear the black star, sign up in the comments below. All it takes is some basic knowledge of Vandy basketball and possibly access to the team's online media guide. When else will you get the chance to pair up a big three of Barry Goheen, Mario Moore, and Ted Skuchas?