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Vanderbilt Basketball Coaching Search Being Taken Over By "Sources"

Honestly -- does Jeff Capel to Vanderbilt make any sense?

By Tom Stephenson
I would be happy if one of these guys were Vanderbilt's head coach. Hint: it's not the guy the media is pushing.
I would be happy if one of these guys were Vanderbilt's head coach. Hint: it's not the guy the media is pushing.
Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

It's been a long time since Vanderbilt basketball has looked for a new head coach.  1999, to be exact, and in 1999 there was no such thing as Twitter.  The internet wasn't in its infancy, but it was a child compared to what it is today.

What the internet has made possible is the mass distribution of bullshit.

So, a national writer with a source tells us that Vanderbilt and Jeff Capel have "mutual interest."  Except...

Well now that looks familiar.  Because it's the same tweet, only replace "Vanderbilt" with "Georgia Tech."

Yep. Both Georgia Tech and Vanderbilt are interested in Capel, we're told. Or at least a "source" is telling us.

Wait, what?  This guy sounds great.  No wonder Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech would both be interested in hiring him!

Except that, well, he's not.  In five years at Oklahoma he had a 96-69 record.  Take out the two years that Blake Griffin was on the team, and his record was a horrendous 43-51.  Before his five-year stint at Oklahoma, he went 79-41 in four years at VCU and won his conference once.  He left behind a mess at Oklahoma (which Lon Kruger cleaned up pretty quickly, because Lon Kruger) and even got the Sooners into hot water with the NCAA.  Since getting fired by Oklahoma, he's spent the last five years as an assistant coach at Duke.

Does any of this sound like a guy who would be of interest to a program like Vanderbilt or Georgia Tech?

That's the writer for the Georgia Tech Rivals site, and he sounds like he has the proper degree of skepticism about this.  The fact that, in the same day, "sources" are telling us that Jeff Capel is some degree of a candidate for an open head coaching job at both an ACC school and an SEC school (while a person who's actually tuned into one of the schools is not buying it) should tell you that these are probably the same "sources" who told them twice in the past week that Wade Baldwin IV was entering the NBA Draft.

In other words, I don't buy Jeff Capel at all.  The "source" for all of these writers is, more than likely, Jeff Capel's agent.  Because really -- does Jeff Capel even sound like a plausible candidate for the head coaching job at Vanderbilt?

In truth, these "hot takes" tell you a lot more about what national writers think of Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech than anything else.  Because only a person who thinks very little of Vanderbilt would think he's a legitimate candidate for the job.

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