Anchor Drop, March 7, 2018: The SEC Tournament is Here

Good morning. The SEC Tournament starts tonight, and somewhat unfortunately, your Vanderbilt Commodores are playing. Vanderbilt is the 13 seed in the tournament and will match up against the Georgia Bulldogs at 6:00 PM CT on the SEC Network, in the first game of the tournament.

My feelings about tonight are very much mixed. On the one hand, this team has the most losses (19) of any in Vanderbilt history. That is as much a function of the schedule and a string of bad luck as anything else: the SRS rating at sports-reference.com says that since 1950, there have somehow been 40 Vanderbilt teams worse than this one. The 6-12 SEC finish is the program’s worst since the 2002-03 team went 3-13. It’s just as well this season come to a close.

On the other hand, as strange as it is, I actually like this team -- much like the “Magnificent Seven” team of 2013-14, this team is weirdly likable in spite of being objectively bad. It’s very possible that tonight will be the final time we see Jeff Roberson and Riley LaChance in a Vanderbilt uniform, and that saddens me.

On the other, other hand, the next time we watch a Vanderbilt basketball game, Darius Garland, Simi Shittu, Aaron Nesmith (ha! I didn’t forget him, people in our Twitter mentions), and possibly Romeo Langford will be playing for us. I get the sense that we may also like those guys.

In other news, in case you missed it, Jeff Roberson was named Second Team All-SEC, which is a great honor for a guy who seemed like an afterthought in the 2014 recruiting class.

The men’s golf team shot a 283 in the final day of the Querencia Cabo Collegiate to finish 8th place in the event.

After tonight’s basketball game, the baseball team visits Long Beach State at 8:00 PM CT to begin a four-game Southern California swing.

Senior attacker Kayla Peterson was named to the Big East Weekly Honor Roll for the fourth week in a row. Yeah, the women’s lacrosse team plays in the Big East; get over it.

Off the West End

Darius Garland was named TSSAA Mr. Basketball for the third year in a row.

The Predators won their ninth game in a row on Tuesday night, a 2-0 shutout victory over the Dallas Stars.

Nashville Mayor Megan Barry plead guilty to felony theft and resigned her office on Tuesday. The less said about this whole saga, the better. David Briley was sworn in as the new mayor.

Memphis is apparently thinking about firing Tubby Smith and bringing in Penny Hardaway as its new head coach. On the surface, this sounds pretty dumb -- Penny Hardaway is a high school coach, after all -- but (a) Penny Hardaway is a legend in Memphis (source: former 12-year-old Memphis kid yours truly) and (b) if there’s one program where the fan base believes that recruiting is literally all there is to being a college basketball coach, it’s Memphis. Still, this is the kind of thing that could very easily fail spectacularly.

THE SOUTH DAKOTA STATE JACKRABBITS ARE DANCING! Ahem... we all know who we’re rooting for in the tournament now. Also punching dance tickets: Wright State, College of Charleston, Long Island, and Gonzaga.

All right. Let’s extend the season one more day, shall we?