Anchor Drop, March 28, 2018: McDonald’s All-American Game Edition

Good morning.

The Vanderbilt baseball team lost 5-1 to Lipscomb at First Tennessee Park last night. I vote we not play any more games at First Tennessee Park.

The women’s lacrosse team hosts Oregon at 3:00 PM CT today. The game will be streamed on Facebook Live.

The McDonald’s All-American Game will be played tonight at 6:00 PM CT and will be televised on ESPN. Normally, this would be of only passing interest to us, but for literally the first time in the history of the game a Vanderbilt signee will be playing. Darius Garland will play for the East team, alongside Vanderbilt targets Romeo Langford and EJ Montgomery. Simi Shittu is officially on the West team but won’t play due to injury.

Off the West End

The Preds won in a shootout over the Minnesota Wild.

College soccer — or more specifically, men’s college soccer -- is a dying sport. The reason basically boils down to the schedule being crammed into a relatively short time period, meaning teams are frequently playing two or three games a week — in a sport that, at the professional level, is usually played once a week. (Yes, there’s the Champions League, but most competing clubs will just use different players in domestic league games when they have a Champions League match during the week.)

Vanderbilt dropped men’s soccer shortly before I enrolled and I remember that decision being rather controversial — but what it boiled down to was that men’s soccer was not a sport sponsored by the SEC, and indeed only two or three SEC schools even field a team.

Pitt hired Duke assistant Jeff Capel to replace Kevin Stallings. Ironically, this was something that somebody (probably Jeff Capel’s agent) suggested we should have done two years ago.

Xavier coach Chris Mack is for some reason taking the Louisville job. The FBI investigation is meaningless.

Mississippi State was eliminated from the NIT. The SEC basketball season is officially over.