- Tennessean: Vanderbilt basketball, Tyler Tanner blow out Mississippi State to end losing streak
- Vandy247: Vanderbilt answers the bell, wins big at Mississippi State
- Sports Illustrated: Vanderbilt Uses Fast Start to Propel to Victory over Mississippi State
- Sports Illustrated: There’s the Vanderbilt basketball team we know. They’re here again.
- Sports Illustrated: Takeaways from Vanderbilt basketball’s 88-56 win over Mississippi State
- Vandy247: This is exactly the type of win that Vanderbilt needed
- Gene’s Page: Vanderbilt blows out Bulldogs 88-56 to extend Mississippi State’s SEC losing streak
- Sports Illustrated: Tyler Tanner’s big performance helps Vanderbilt get back on track
- Vandy247: Will Perdue’s “final five thoughts” on the Mississippi State game
- Associated Press: No. 15 Vanderbilt snaps a 3-game skid with an 88-56 win over Mississippi State
This was a straight domination of the type we saw quite a bit in the nonconference portion of the schedule, but that hadn’t been seen for weeks. Interestingly, Vanderbilt only won two of the four factors: Mississippi State got to the foul line more often and grabbed more of their own misses, but Mississippi State also had a lot more misses and turned the ball over at nearly twice the rate that Vanderbilt did.
Instead, Vanderbilt shot 27-of-40 inside the arc, back to its old ways of scoring at will
on two-pointers. Mississippi State isn’t very good, though they did manage to win at Texas (a task that eluded Vanderbilt.) Unlike LSU or South Carolina earlier, though, Vanderbilt treated Mississippi State like a bad team. This was a get-right game and Vanderbilt won easily.
Individual Stats
- I don’t want to be so reductive as to say that Vanderbilt goes as Tyler Tanner and Duke Miles go, but Tanner was meh at Texas and Arkansas and Miles was dreadful in the latter game. So, here, with those two getting back to normal and you can see how that affected Vanderbilt.
- Miles’ 7 steals, by the way, were one shy of the Vanderbilt school record — shared by Frank Seckar, Atiba Prater, and James Strong. Somehow, all three games in which a Vanderbilt player had eight steals (a) occurred when Jan van Breda Kolff was the head coach and (b) came against an OVC team. Weird coincidences all around! Anyway, 7 steals against an SEC team seems like it’s actually probably better than eight against an OVC team.
- Going off Offensive Rating, this was actually Tyler Nickel’s worst game since the Memphis game (when he shot 2-of-10 from three.)
- I think Vanderbilt will need Devin McGlockton and AK Okereke to be better than this when we’re playing teams better than Mississippi State.
- Nice performances from Jalen Washington and Chandler Bing off the bench. It seems like Mike James has taken Tyler Harris’s minutes? Maybe that will switch back after Harris went 3-for-3 from the floor and James… got whistled for four fouls in 12 minutes.
- Still no Frankie Collins or Mason Nicholson. Jayden Leverett and Jaylon Dean-Vines made a late appearance, and for Dean-Vines this was only his second appearance in SEC play. I don’t really know what the future holds for either of them.
What’s Next
Kentucky comes to Memorial Gym on Tuesday night. As of now the game will be at 8 PM CT on ESPN, though given the winter storm pummeling most of the country right now, who knows if it will stay that way. Kentucky has now won five in a row after beating Ole Miss 72-63 yesterday.
Around the SEC
Well, Alabama brought in a ringer from the G-League and lost to Tennessee at home anyway, so there’s that. Overall it was a rough day for ranked SEC teams, with Florida losing to Auburn at home and Georgia losing by 20 at Texas. Hell, Arkansas just barely held off LSU, who’s now 1-6 in the SEC.
Texas A&M is now in sole possession of first place in the league after blowing out South Carolina, and I’d assume they will be entering the Top 25 on Monday. Missouri beat Oklahoma after hitting buzzer-beaters both to send the game to overtime and to win it in the extra session.
Again, Texas A&M is now in sole possession of first place at 6-1, with Florida, Arkansas, and Kentucky all tied at 5-2. Vanderbilt, along with Auburn, Georgia, and Missouri, is 4-3 in the league with Alabama and Tennessee half a game back at 3-3. Texas and Ole Miss are 3-4, South Carolina and Mississippi State are 2-5, and LSU and Oklahoma are 1-6, but both have been mostly competitive — but it seems like Matt McMahon and Porter Moser are both on track to get fired. I would also assume Lamont Paris’s seat at South Carolina is pretty warm.
