Anchor Drop, July 1, 2018: 62 Days

Good morning.

Today marks 62 days from Vanderbilt’s season opener against Middle Tennessee State. Strangely, Vanderbilt hasn’t had a football player wear #62 since former offensive lineman Ryan Seymour (pictured above), who last played for the Commodores in 2012.

ICYMI: Last night, Vanderbilt picked up its tenth commitment of the 2019 class in Pearl-Cohn’s Jayden Harrison. The addition of Harrison moves Vanderbilt’s class up to 52nd in the 247 Sports composite (take that, Colorado, Toledo, and Oregon State!), though it’s still 12th in the SEC. The class is now 55th in Rivals.

For a refresher, here’s the list of commits to date:

• TE Joel DeCoursey (Zionsville, IN)
• TE Jeffrey Blake (Norcross, GA)
• DE Christian James (Memphis, TN)
• QB Jamil Muhammad (Madison, AL)
• TE Justin Ball (Washington, DC)
• DB Justin Harris (Gadsden, AL)
• ATH JR Tran-Reno (Birmingham, AL)
• DT Daevion Davis (Madison, AL)
• ATH Devin Boddie (Memphis, TN)
• ATH Jayden Harrison (Nashville, TN)

An interesting note: While Derek Mason tried to recruit the West Coast and Hawaii heavily early in his tenure, eight of the ten commitments so far in this year’s class are from within a four-hour radius of Nashville (and Joel DeCoursey, who’s from basically Indianapolis, is just outside that radius.) The class includes four players from Alabama and three from Tennessee. Mason seems to be finding the sweet spot for recruiting.

Anyway, it’s the dead season, but we’re just a couple of weeks away from SEC Media Days, which makes this a good time to talk about the contract dispute between ESPN and Paul Finebaum. Paul Finebaum is, of course, an interesting character. Everybody has their opinions of him, many of them bad, but it’s actually kind of difficult to think of another personality who sums up the Southeastern Conference more than PAWWWWWWWL. Granted, if you listen to just about any drive-time sports talk radio show in any non-professional town in the Southern states, you’ll probably hear something very similar to the Paul Finebaum Show, which is why this contract dispute is happening. Take away the name, and you realize it’s not that difficult for ESPN to find someone else to do what Paul does for the SEC Network. Which is... well, we’re not exactly sure, other than provide filler on weekday afternoons that the network could use to broadcast, you know, games and stuff.

Other than that... Sonny Gray got lit up (ugh), NBA free agency stupid season is here, and in the World Cup, France and Uruguay advanced. Today: Spain-Russia and Denmark-Croatia.