Anchor Drop, June 9, 2020: 88 Days to Kickoff

Good morning.

There are now 88 days left under Vanderbilt football’s scheduled season opener against Mercer. Vanderbilt has two players who wear #88 (and I will spare you my rant about duplicate numbers, or at least wait for the comments section if pressed): 6’5”, 238-pound linebacker Michael Owusu, a redshirt junior who’s played in 20 games with zero starts over the last two seasons, and Pearl-Cohn product Jayden Harrison, a wide receiver who redshirted last year.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Vanderbilt soccer welcomes seven new signees to campus, and Coach Darren Ambrose has quotes on all of them.

Robbie Weinstein at 247 Sports has an interview with Mason Hickman in advance of tomorrow’s MLB Draft. He also talks about how Vanderbilt’s new defensive line will look.

New football commit Alan “Taco” Wright says that his brother didn’t factor into his decision.

Not related to sports, but the Hustler has an editorial on Vanderbilt’s failure to support graduate workers during the pandemic.

Chris Lee podcasted with the Tennessean’s Gentry Estes about whether Vanderbilt will play football this fall. (My guess is yes, unless literally no one is playing football this fall. Also, I haven’t listened to this podcast yet.)

And since parlagi brought up in the comments yesterday the very important question of what will happen with the Ivies and Division III schools, my thinking is that if students are allowed to be on campus, there really isn’t a good reason not to play football, though maybe without fans in attendance. (On the flipside, if it’s too dangerous for students to be on campus, it’s probably too dangerous for them to be playing football.)

And in other news, Dabo Swinney is a throwback to a 1980s college football coach in all the problematic ways.

Updated: When will baseball come back?

Changing the headline because we’ve figured out when some sports are coming back, with MLB remaining the lone holdout. MLB proposed a 76-game season on Monday, which includes 75 percent prorated salaries. It doesn’t sound like the players will accept it, but MLB now has more leverage for the simple reason that the calendar is working in their favor: the longer they go without reaching a deal, the shorter the season gets by necessity (so long as MLB is insistent on the regular season ending in September, which it doesn’t appear they’re going to budge on.) Again: this is a shitshow.

Actual Sports on TV

A German soccer cup match between FC Saarbrucken and Bayer Leverkusen at 1:30 PM CT on ESPN. I suppose you will watch German soccer and you will like it.

Costa Rican Soccer Update

Escazucena defeated Sporting San Jose 2-1 in the first leg of the second division playoff final. I assume one of them gets promoted after this?