Anchor Drop, August 17, 2023: 9 Days to Kickoff

Good morning.

Optional Musical Accompaniment

We are now 9 days away from Vanderbilt football’s season opener against Hawaii. 9 for the Commodores is defensive lineman Daevion Davis. The 6’2”, 288-pound redshirt senior from Madison, Alabama, appeared in only one game last season after recovering from a torn ACL suffered toward the end of 2021; prior to the injury, he started nine games and made 25 tackles in the 2021 season.

And tonight at 7 PM CT, Vanderbilt soccer opens its season with Chattanooga coming to visit. You can watch tonight’s match on the SEC Network+. Patrick will probably have a game thread up.

Meantime, Chad Withrow (because of course it was him) finally said the quiet part out loud about the complaints about FirstBank Stadium being under construction:

There aren’t regularly 27K Vanderbilt fans at Vanderbilt home games. Last year, Vanderbilt drew less than that for two games: Elon and Wake Forest. Ole Miss drew 31567, South Carolina 28553, and Florida 30136. And then the Tennessee game was a sellout. In other words, most of the time Vanderbilt isn’t drawing much more than 27,000 anyway, with a fair number of those being opposing fans. The big, stadium-invading opponents like Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama will sell the place out, but Chad is saying out loud that Vanderbilt should be required to accommodate these people in a way that no other SEC school would be asked to do.

It’s not our job to make it easy for you, opposing fan, to get tickets so that you can come have a weekend on Broadway and see your team get an easy win (though Florida, notably, did not last season.) The stadium improvements might actually start helping us not be an easy win, which I think is what people like Chad are really concerned about: Vanderbilt being a team that’s tough to beat and that doesn’t have a whole bunch of empty seats available for Tennessee fans to take.

Sports on TV

All times Central.

• 8:15 AM: PGA Tour: BMW Championship, First Round (ESPN+)
• 1:00 PM: MLB: Mariners at Royals (MLB Network)
• 1:00 PM: PGA Tour: BMW Championship, First Round (Golf Channel)
• 4:00 PM: MLB: Red Sox at Nationals (MLB Network)
• 6:15 PM: MLB: Tigers at Guardians or Mets at Cardinals (FOX)
• 9:00 PM: MLB: Brewers at Dodgers or Diamondbacks at Padres (MLB Network)

Scoreboard

MLB: Tigers 8, Twins 7 ... Mets 8, Pirates 3 ... Diamondbacks 9, Rockies 7 ... Rays 6, Giants 1 ... Reds 7, Guardians 2 ... Astros 12, Marlins 5 ... A’s 8, Cardinals 0 ... Nationals 6, Red Sox 2 ... Phillies 9, Blue Jays 4 ... Braves 2, Yankees 0 ... Angels 2, Rangers 0 ... Cubs 4, White Sox 3 ... Mariners 6, Royals 5 ... Padres 5, Orioles 2 ... Dodgers 7, Brewers 1.