“Poor Vanderbilt” has been a frequent expression throughout the years during football season in the Southeastern Conference.
The Commodores have yet to win an SEC football championship, last finished runners-up in 1935 and are 285 games below .500 all-time in league contests. Such sympathy waned this past decade, however, when Vanderbilt made five bowl appearances and defeated rival Tennessee five times as well.
Vanderbilt has more than held its own historically in basketball – the Commodores entered this season trailing only Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee in the category of career conference victories – but the program is on the verge of setting a dubious standard. If Vanderbilt loses to Kentucky in Rupp Arena on Wednesday night, the Commodores would set a record with 25 consecutive regular-season league losses.
Sewanee, an original member of the SEC in 1933 and the first university to depart in 1940, lost 24 straight conference basketball games from 1938 to 1940.
“You just try to live in the moment of who we are,” Vanderbilt first-year coach Jerry Stackhouse said. “I didn’t bring in a losing streak from last year, but obviously I’m still looking to put my imprint on this team and on this roster as we go forward. We knew what we were coming into, and we felt confident with the pieces that we had at the beginning of the season.”
The last regular-season league win for the Commodores occurred on March 3, 2018, when they defeated Ole Miss 82-69.
Vanderbilt became the first SEC team ever to endure an 0-18 league record last season, which resulted in the dismissal of third-year Commodores coach Bryce Drew. This season’s team has started out 0-6 in SEC play, with an opening 83-79 defeat at Auburn the only close call.
The Commodores lost sophomore forward Aaron Nesmith to a stress fracture in his foot at Auburn and have since lost five straight contests by at least 15 points. Nesmith was averaging 23.0 points and 35.7 minutes per game, and he was shooting a staggering 52.2% from 3-point range.
Nesmith was 60-of-115 from long range after a 4-of-6 showing at Auburn, but the Commodores are just 20-of-131 in 3-point attempts (15.3%) since, including an 0-for-25 showing against Tennessee that halted the program’s streak of at least one 3-pointer at 1,080 straight games.
The loss of Nesmith was reminiscent of last season, when the Commodores lost eventual top-five NBA pick Darius Garland to a torn meniscus before he even played 150 college minutes. Losing Nesmith was not the first setback for this season’s team, with senior forward Clevon Brown sustaining a meniscus injury in mid December.
Brown hasn’t played since.
“To lose two pieces like that is pretty significant in terms of changes you make in how you have to approach this,” Stackhouse said. “We’ve got to find a different way, and that’s hard to do once you’ve started conference play.”
Vanderbilt is coming off its worst performance of the season, a 90-64 drubbing Saturday night at the hands of South Carolina. Gamecocks coach Frank Martin is always willing to wave a league banner, but even he realized the dire dilemma for the Commodores in the weeks ahead.
“They’re thin in the front line, and they’re all freshmen,” Martin said in a news conference following the blowout. “Being aggressive at the rim was our game plan going in. I think we wore them down.”
Kentucky certainly has the depth and talent to extend Vanderbilt’s misery, and the Wildcats have the track record as well, having assembled a 40-2 record against the Commodores in Rupp.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.