Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Deja Vu All Over Again: Vanderbilt Loses to Vols at Home

The only word I can think right now of to describe what just happened in the last 10 minutes of that game is "inexcusable." The inability to handle pressure and protect possession, the inability to get Jenkins open using screens or create back-doors when UT was overplaying on defense, the carelessness, the missed free throws... Vanderbilt went the last five minutes of the game without a field goal and allowed UT to end the game on a 19-3 run in the last 9:12. Remarkable.

Give Tennessee credit: Their backs were against the wall tonight and their season was on the line, and they came up huge with a 60-51 victory after being down by as many as 11 points. Still, after what the Vols did to us at their place, I wouldn't have believed that this could happen in Memorial if I hadn't just seen it with my own two.

Begin your own rant now.

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just punched a hole in the wall of my apartment... guess I'll be going to Lowes this weekend.

Anonymous said...

Not worth ranting - dont care anymore - out coached by the cheater and out played.

Typical end of season collapse. 8-8 SEC

Anonymous said...

Apparently turning the ball over 15 times a game on average is acceptable nowadays. Clearly this issue hasn't been addressed all year by the coaching staff and we've been lucky enough to overcome it on several occasions with good 3pt shooting. But tonight was not the case.

Anonymous said...

Someone @ AOG put it best, this is what it's like when JJ and JT don't show up. It's a loss, nothing more or less. We'll beat LSU and FL. Keep in mind we may meet up w/ UT in the SEC Tourney. There's always tomorrow.

Anonymous said...

I threw the TV remote at the wall upon Goulbourne's second missed free throw. Broken. Like my heart.

FiveStarDore said...

Not this %&$! again.

AD said...

I had been praising and encouraging JJ for being more assertive on the dribble, but his limits there are now quite clear.

Perhaps Brad's ankle was bothering him more than we know?

Fuller?

Walker-- would've liked to see him rise up a bit.

JT played good D for 3/4 of the game, and then his mark won the game for UT. Yes he had good games against Miss. St. and Auburn, but against quality opponents? He vanishes.

Where was Odom tonight?

We were out hustled, and the defense (rebounding in particular) was pedestrian at best.

Anonymous said...

Agree with you AD, and Fes back to fouling out.

X$#%^ is correct. Recall that is when we panicked and ran no real offense.

Anonymous said...

I love Vandy basketball, but this is the kind of letdown that makes me want to swear off sports (for a few minutes anyway). The only way they make up for this one is to win the last three, and that means winning at Rupp and beating the new SEC East Champion Florida here. Also, they have to hope to get another shot at UT in the SEC Tourney and actually show some backbone the third time around. Honestly, I wished Vandy would have lost to Georgia and the mid-major team named Auburn last week than to have lost this one tonight. Sorry to rant so negatively, but it is a better way for me to vent than to burn my Florida tickets.

Thomas said...

Well we got Andre back, this is what we were waiting for… right? At the end of the day it was just a collective mess. Even Tennessee wasn’t that great but they did enough to win. We will not finish 8-8, this team is too good. Good teams have their off nights and it sucks ours was against our in-state rival.

Anonymous said...

I just wonder what the conversation is like this year when we continue to blow games like this. No one, including our coach is held accountable for anything.

John wasn't getting shots tonight b/c Bruce Pearl decided that he was the only person on our team who could win games for us. It's amazing when their whole defense was based on not giving him looks that our coach who is supposed to be fantastic with X's and O's could not adjust to find looks for the other guys who had to have been wide open given the attention Jenkins was getting.

I also wonder how these persistent issues of 2nd chance pts, sloppy ball handling, poor rebounding which have plagued us all year continue to not be addressed. It's just a shame b/c Stallings used to win games with gameplanning b/c he didn't have the talent, and now that we have the talent, we are badly underachieving. Mark it down- this team is losing first round, and that's not being pessimistic that's being realistic.

Anonymous said...

jenkins selfish tonight

Fes and ST let us down.

AD said...

My last point for the night and then I want to sleep for 20 years:

Re: coaching:
The key coaching move I think was the late switch to zone, which was just as bad for us tonight as it was good for us late against UK, and it was doubly bad tonight because it allowed their only offensive option to move much more freely and win the game while directly attacking our bigs, both of whom were in foul trouble.

Anonymous said...

Awful job of coaching. Seems like the coaching staff should be able to come up with screens to get JJ some better looks. I don't like Pearl or what he stands for in college basketball. To be out-coached by him was hard to take.

macpfled said...

Tennessee played an amazing 2nd half, executed their game plan perfectly.
the bright side:
-Maybe this pisses the guys off at just the right time to go on a tear heading into the tourney?
-This game keeps JJ firmly out of the NBA next year. JT continues his trend towards staying...
-Unless we really blow it we are in the 4-6 seed mesh and it just doesn't matter
-We have a chance to sweep KY next week and get that #2 seed.

Andrew Smith said...

I certainly wouldn't argue that we played well, but the officials clearly played a pretty big role in tonight's loss.

Tennessee's plan for shutting JJ down was to grab him and hold him, several times per play, every play, all night long. Their plan for guarding the ball handler and disrupting our offense was to foul the guy with the ball repeatedly. Of their 15 "steals," 10 came from fouls and five of them were incredibly blatant.

Fouling hard and aggressively is a fantastic way to stop the other team from scoring, but only if the officials let you get away with it. (Actually, if the refs will let you get away with it, it's an almost unbeatable strategy and it goes far toward explaining the Big East's success in the past decade -- all with teams that possess what turns out to be zero NBA talent.)

If the officials had called the game properly -- blowing five fouls against whoever they put on JJ in the first 90 seconds of the game and thereby putting a stop to it -- you would have seen a very different game.

This particular crew -- led by the guy with the buzz cut who looks rather like Frank Purdue -- always calls against Vandy.

Could we have still won if we played well? Obviously. Tenn is a vastly inferior team. They only have one player who could start for us and only three who could get minutes on Vandy.

But merely competent refs would have secured a victory for us.

Dore.ZA said...

Here's the good news: That was a first round tournament loss that didn't happen in the first round of the tournament. I hope we learned something and that we don't hang our heads for too long. We deserve to feel terrible tonight. Then we need to forget it and get ready for a big March. There is no reason that performance ever needs to be repeated. It happened yesterday, after all.

Anonymous said...

Amazing how many of my comments given early in the season, ie poor coaching, personnel use, and rebounding, that continue not to be addressed by our coachung staff are now being latched onto by everyone.

Box out.
Taylor is disallowed from the three ball (dont care what his % is, these shots are turnovers in games that matter).
Lance and Steve NEVER play together.
Lance sits ALOT more.
Lance does not dribble.

Just those few things should clear up some major issues

Anonymous said...

Lack of leadership. During those last 5 minutes, Scotty Hopson showed that he was the leader of that UT team and took over. What did we do? We dribble around to the end of the shot clock never once getting even a chance at a good look and then Brad has to throw up a prayer. To me that shows that we have a lack of leadership. No one on this team wants to take over, not even JJ. His selfish play last night was one of the biggest reasons we lost. He had to have had at least 5 key turnovers last night. I know we all love him, none more than me, but as Stallings said after the game, "sometimes part of being a good basketball player is knowing what you cannot do," and JJ is not a ball handler. There is no excuse for that last night. There is a reason that Brad/Kyle/Andre/and sometimes JT are the only ones who bring the ball up the floor for us. What we need is someone who when the game gets tight like that puts his team on his back and helps carry them to the finish line. Hopson did that for UT last night, while JJ continued to get the ball stolen away from him. Pathetic.