Save the Shield! A Vanderbilt sports blog

One of the joys of getting more involved in the college sports blogosphere has been finding the sort of longer analytical articles that I always expected to be better-suited to blogs and less-well-suited to message boards.

This one is only directly related to us in that it discusses the Week 1 play of our rival and 11th opponent this season, but I think it’s well worth the read: UT vs. The One-Armed Judo Champion by hooper at Rocky Top Talk.   If nothing else, it should dissuade any Vanderbilt fans from thinking the Tennessee game is easily winnable.    (I give us about a 12.5% chance based on the two teams’ track record so far, but the implication of the article is that UTK should look much better once they have time to adjust to this Norm Chow masterstroke.)

Perhaps I’m just misunderstanding the analogy, but it seems to me there’s one imperfection in the analogy. (It’s a spoiler, so at least read the story of the one-armed judo champion before proceeding.)

The judo champion succeeded because his opponents couldn’t thwart his move, because his lack of a left arm made it impossible.   But hooper seems to be telling us that the UTK defense could have adjusted to block the passing lanes, but didn’t:

The linebackers played a solid game, but I believe that the defensive schemes left them in positions to end a play only after the play had already been made; they were rarely given a chance to disrupt the passing lanes or hit the receivers immediately.  (In short, they had to play reactively rather than proactively.)

Of course I could be misunderstanding that paragraph.

At any rate, I lack the technical expertise about football to make analyses like this on my own, but I really value this kind of stuff.   IMO TV analysts should be giving us more of this and less of the fluff that they often do.   (In fairness, it’s much harder to pull this off in real time, which is why the really good TV analysts are pure gold.)

If you like this kind of article, please comment and I’ll look for more such stuff to link in the future, especially when it’s related to one of VU’s opponents.

Potpourri

Surfing from there, I found a Michigan - Miami preview that makes me so very much happier that the Wolverines look set for a pretty crappy season:

[Porous run defense] continued into their season opener against Vandy. QB Chris Nickson, who you may remember playing Guy At The Bottom Of Huge Pile during the 2006 Vandy-Michigan game, blowed [sic.] up, with 166 yards on 20 carries. As a whole, Vandy went for 269 yards on 50 rushes, 5.4 a pop. Vandy.

Vanderbilt.

We’re not at the point where anyone can say anything about this Michigan team’s offense with confidence, but if we can’t plow these guys we’re in for a long, long year.

Yeah, Miami must be terrible if even Vanderbilt can rush on them.   (Final score: Michigan 16-6, with 281 total yards and 178 rushing yards for Michigan, around 80 and 90 fewer respectively than Vanderbilt against the same opponent.   Oh, but wait, we had the visiting-team advantage.)

Snedeker sank like a rock right after I posted about him, finishing T55th 18 shots off the lead.  At least he tied Harrington.

VU women’s soccer is still undefeated after a 4-1 win at Tennessee Tech Sunday.   The wild thing there was that Tech led 1-0 at the half.