Anchor Drop, September 26, 2019: Soccer at Arkansas

Good morning.

After opening SEC play with a home win over Tennessee on Sunday, Vanderbilt soccer goes on the road tonight to face Arkansas. The Razorbacks are ranked 13th in the United Soccer Coaches poll (Vanderbilt is 15th.) You can stream the game, which will start at 7:00 PM CT, on the SEC Network+.

Vanderbilt senior tight end Cody Markel has been named as one of 185 semifinalists for the Campbell Trophy, awarded annually to the best football scholar-athlete in the nation.

Men’s basketball opened practice on Wednesday. (Yessh, practice starts this early now?) Here are some interviews:

Adam Sparks wonders if optimism is the best thing after Vanderbilt’s 0-3 start to the season.

The Hustler has a three-game report card for Riley Neal, as well as three matchups to watch against Northern Illinois.

Off the West End

At SI, Ross Dellenger writes that D’Eriq King’s decision adds a new element to the redshirt rule. (ICYMI, King and another Houston teammate are sitting out the rest of the 2019 season so that they can return in 2020.)

I think the four-game redshirt rule is a good thing on the whole. For one thing, it helps prevent situations like Trent Sherfield’s in 2014, when he burned a year of eligibility to play a relatively small number of snaps (though he did play in seven games, so he wouldn’t have qualified anyway.) It also means that freshmen can play up to four games without using a year. Play a freshman in an FCS game, a couple of blowouts, and a bowl game, and they still get a fifth year. The flipside now is that a coach can now game the system a bit and basically just shut the season down if he doesn’t like what he sees after four games, and that’s essentially what Dana Holgorsen is doing; Houston fell to 1-3 on the season after a loss to Tulane last week.

For some reason, there were rumors that Urban Meyer was going to Michigan, which is officially the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

More Tennessee players are headed for the exits.

The NCAA President called the various “name, image, and likeness” bills a threat to the NCAA. Which, no shit. On the other hand, I’ve always had a cynical view of “name, image, and likeness” anyway: by basically crowdsourcing payments to players instead of directly paying them, it dodges Title IX and also ensures that the most popular teams will continue to get the best players (a severe downside of, say, Vanderbilt getting to pay players directly is that Vanderbilt has a lot more money than Alabama.) In fact, many of the proponents of this have specifically said they’re doing it to evade Title IX.

(I also agree with Doug Gottlieb that there really aren’t many players whose name, image, and likeness would have much value if not for the school that they played for; so, in fact, many of these players would really be profiting off their school’s name, image, and likeness.)

Gary Parrish writes that the NCAA is probably not going to miss its shot at Kansas, which tends to happen when the weapon you have is a bazooka.

The Big 12 is the first conference to have an official hard seltzer, because of course the Big 12 is the first conference to have an official hard seltzer. Now, can somebody explain to me the difference between “hard seltzer” and Zima?

Scoreboard

MLB: Diamondbacks 9, Cardinals 7 ... Twins 5, Tigers 1 ... Brewers 9, Reds 2 ... Rays 4, Yankees 0 ... Nationals 5, Phillies 2 ... Pirates 4, Cubs 2 ... Blue Jays 3, Orioles 2 ... Mets 10, Marlins 3 ... Red Sox 10, Rangers 3 ... White Sox 8, Indians 3 ... Braves 10, Royals 2 ... Giants 2, Rockies 1 ... A’s 3, Angels 2 ... Dodgers 6, Padres 4 ... Astros 3, Mariners 0.