Anchor Drop, February 22, 2018: Hockey Gold

Good morning. Your Vanderbilt Commodores baseball team beat Presbyterian 15-2 on Wednesday afternoon to improve to 4-1 on the season. Freshman Jake Eder, in his collegiate debut, allowed one hit and struck out four batters over four innings. The Commodores will be off on Thursday before starting a three-game series with UMass-Lowell on Friday.

Godfrey Dillard will be honored as Vanderbilt’s 2018 SEC Legend at the SEC Tournament next month. Dillard, along with Perry Wallace, integrated Vanderbilt’s freshman basketball team in 1966-67, though unlike Wallace, Dillard never made it to varsity after a knee injury derailed his career.

The women’s basketball team travels to Missouri tonight at 7 PM CT. That game will be broadcast on the SEC Network+ and the WatchESPN app. The women’s team is 6-22 on the season and 2-12 in the SEC, while Missouri is 22-5 and ranked #11 in the AP poll, so... yeah.

Off the West End

The U.S. women’s hockey team won gold last night in Pyeongchang, beating Canada 3-2 in a shootout. That broke a string of four straight gold medals for the Canadians. Mikaela Shiffrin won the silver in the women’s Alpine Combined skiing event.

Pat Forde and Pete Thamel detailed the payment scheme that is the subject of the FBI investigation into college hoops. Look — I get that there are good arguments for paying college players, but many of them are made in bad faith. And let’s not ignore the reality that there are some people who would very much like to keep the current NCAA scheme of selective enforcement of amateurism rules in place — because it’s great if it means you can get away with paying players under the table and your competition can’t. Notice how many more people are questioning how Vanderbilt landed a couple of five-star recruits while Duke landing the top three recruits in the same class is just how the world works.

Bill C. previewed our C-USA bros yesterday, who have also gone with the “hire a Stanford coordinator and copy what they’re doing” plan, seeing how well that’s working out for us. He also dropped his Charlotte preview as I’m writing this. And yes, Bill is writing college football previews in February.

Pitt had an announced attendance of 2,420 for last night’s game against Wake Forest. I don’t know why I snicker every time I think about Pitt’s basketball program, somebody help me out here.

NFL scouts continue to be complete idiots when evaluating a certain kind of college quarterback. If you think Lamar Jackson should move to wide receiver in the NFL, how in God’s name are you still employed?

Darius Garland is looking to win a fourth consecutive state championship, albeit in the state classification that has about ten schools in it. Aaron Nesmith scored the 2,000th point of his high school career in Porter-Gaud’s state quarterfinal win.