Anchor Drop, August 14, 2018: 18 Days

Good morning.

We’re 18 days away from Vanderbilt’s season opener against Middle Tennessee. Two players on this year’s roster wear #18. Redshirt freshman Colin Anderson enters the season in the mix to start at inside linebacker, while redshirt sophomore quarterback Mo Hasan looks like he’ll be the backup to Kyle Shurmur.

Vanderbilt senior Will Gordon posted a 2-under par 69 on the first day of the U.S. Amateur on Monday, putting him in a tie for fourth and two shots behind the leaders. Patrick Martin is in a tie for 28th after shooting even par, while John Augenstein and Harrison Ott are in a tie for 43rd at 1-over par. The top 64 players at the end of the day today will advance to match play starting on Wednesday.

Adam Sparks started a fire a couple of weeks ago with a piece on the university’s negligence of Vanderbilt Stadium and poured accelerant on it yesterday by bringing quotes from former players. Twitter hints that Joe Rexrode has more coming on this, too.

Off the West End

The NCAA is handing out transfer waivers like candy.

Tennessee apparently hasn’t decided on a quarterback, which... if their new graduate transfer can’t beat out the quarterbacks they had last year, well, why did they bring him in?

All of the fretting about players losing out on scholarship opportunities because of the NCAA’s reform of the summer recruiting period seems to miss the obvious point that schools still have scholarships to give and those opportunities will just go to someone different, I guess. This is just a weird thing to complain about.

One reason why MLB is losing fans: because they do stuff like make a big stink about players celebrating home runs.

Former WWE star Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart died at 63.