Save the Shield! A Vanderbilt sports blog

It’s a weird time for me to be thinking about football recruiting, but a thread on VandySports about Stanford got my brain working on this topic.
The national media often talks about college sports recruiting as though there’s a static pecking order of teams who just line up and draft their targets. In football, [...]

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The commissioner of the SEC (the Southern Fat Cat one, not the Wall Street Fat Cat one) sent out an edict last week stating that it was no longer open season on officials. This year, we’ve seen more criticism of officiating than is the norm.
Your Mississippi States, Kentuckys and Vanderbilts have always been [...]

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I’m not good at obsessing over week-to-week details, especially when the team’s not really competing for any postseason honors. I was going to direct you to VSL, but I see that Bobby only made it through the first quarter in detailed fashion and Stan has turned his attention to the Carolina game. [...]

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It occurs to me that I’ve spent several months since December getting in mild disputes with half the population of VandySports.com for believing that dumb luck played a significant role in Vanderbilt’s 2008 football season. Now I’m getting in mild disputes with the other half for believing that the coaching staff isn’t a [...]

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I really wish I didn’t care about this sport. I just can’t imagine how much bitterer this season would be if we’d screwed it up at Kentucky last year and finished 5-7. Good grief.

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I don’t have anything to say about the Miss State game. Really, I don’t care to go back and review video and reports to get a clearer idea about what’s wrong with this offense. See VSL or from the State point of view For Whom the Cowbell Tolls for more about [...]

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I don’t have a lot to say about this game. I was playing poker Saturday night so I just followed the game from the Bottom Line. I don’t get the channel that carried it so I couldn’t DVR it to watch. I’ve read some of the comments on VandySports [...]

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As it stands now, throughout the season I’m just going to try to toss out a few ill-informed comments about each Vanderbilt game. Out of economic self-interest I spend most of my Saturday afternoons and evenings in casino poker rooms, so even when the VU game is on a TV channel I can [...]

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Sometimes I’m too wordy. So I took a crack at summarizing my 2009 football prediction from the last post:

The team returns most of its talent and should perform a lot better on “fundamental” metrics, especially offensive yardage, which will improve our net yardage.
The way we won games last year, often getting outgained but [...]

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NOTE: As I was wrapping up this post on Sunday night, I surfed over to Vanderbilt Sports Line and saw their reference to the news broken by VandySports.com about the Terence Jeffers-Harris situation. Take that as a sign of how out-of-touch I’ve been about the daily news coming out of the program. [...]

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