The Vanderbilt Problem, part one
How Jerry Stackhouse's Vanderbilt has collapsed under a multitude of recruiting struggles, portal struggles, and poor roster management
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On with the show.
The early stages of a season can offer some pretty strange occurrences. Generally, teams can shoot up or implode out of nowhere over the course of any month of the season, but it certainly feels most prominent in November and December, when we know the least about the teams in front of us. This year alone, you’ve had the surprise stories of BYU, Princeton, James Madison, and several others. On the flip side, you’ve seen some seriously underwhelming runs of play from stalwarts like UCLA, Maryland, Michigan State, and even the usually unflappable Arkansas.
At least by KenPom’s Adjusted Efficiency Margin, the two biggest underachievers of the season to date are Siena and Pacific, who currently sit 360th and 346th in his rankings. That’s pretty bad, obviously. It’s also not that interesting, because neither were expected to do much of anything in their respective conferences or on a national scale. The third-largest underachiever of 2023-24 interests me far more. You may have heard about them.
Vanderbilt basketball entered this year with either expectations, hopes, or both of making the 2024 NCAA Tournament. It was a reasonable ask, frankly. Vandy last made the Big Dance in 2017 and only last year have they really come close to another bid. Of the 14 SEC teams, only Vandy, South Carolina, and Georgia have failed to make at least one of the five Tournaments.
This year, South Carolina has at least put together the second-best record of any SEC team in non-conference play and has cracked the KenPom top 70 for the first time since January 2021. Georgia is faring less well, but at least has the excuse of being in year 2 of a new head coach. Vanderbilt, meanwhile, is the worst team in the conference by miles, sitting at 212th. The closest team, LSU, is 108 spots away at the time of writing. Vanderbilt is 4-8 and projected to finish 7-24, which would set a program record for losses in a single season (currently 23).
How did it get this bad? While Vanderbilt has never been a beacon of dominance, there’s a real tradition of respectable, quality performance, with four Sweet Sixteen bids post-expansion and 13 NCAA Tournament bids from 1988 to 2017. During that same 30-season timespan, Vanderbilt went .500 or better in the SEC 18 times. Even dire records were unlikely; just once, in 2002-03, did Vandy win fewer than four conference games. They’re currently projected to do it for the fourth time in six seasons.
There’s a litany of reasons for why. A good amount of them are on-court related, and we’ll go into those. But it’s deeper than that. Vanderbilt’s talent acquisition and roster management have cratered. Their off-court troubles lead to on-court issues, and vice versa.
Even beyond the men’s basketball program, the situation at Vanderbilt is horrific. Football went 2-10 this year and has won six SEC conference games in the last six seasons. While Shea Ralph appears to have them heading in a better direction, the women’s basketball program - a program with 15 Sweet Sixteen bids from 1990 to 2009 - has not made the Big Dance since 2014. They’re unlikely to change that this season, as Her Hoop Stats ranks VU as the 13th-best team in the SEC out of 14. Their last winning SEC record happened before “Get Lucky” was released.
The other sports aren’t hot, either. I rarely bother with the Learfield Director’s Cup, a metric that somewhat measures success across all sports, but in terms of in-conference comparisons, it mostly works. Vanderbilt’s finished 12th, 13th, 13th, and 13th among SEC programs over the last four full seasons. Considering that three of the four biggest ticket sellers are projected to finish 14th/13th/14th (baseball, the fourth, is projected to be a top 10-15 team nationally this year), it’s probably the worst sustained stretch of play across the big three at Vandy in the university’s modern history.
So: I’ve come here to analyze three things.
How much of Vanderbilt’s failures are just the poor choice to hire Jerry Stackhouse;
How much of Vanderbilt’s failures are due to Vanderbilt University;
Where Vanderbilt men’s basketball can go from here.
The first of these questions is the only one that will be covered today; the remaining two will be covered in separate posts still to come.
The theory of the Stackhouse hire when it was first presented was that the recruiting would come first, then the coaching. Stackhouse had no college coaching experience when hired by Vanderbilt’s former athletic director Malcolm Turner, who just so happened to be the G-League’s president when Stackhouse was the head coach of the Toronto Raptors’ affiliate. Stackhouse ran an AAU program based in Atlanta/NC that had Brandon Ingram on it, along with a few other notable-ish pieces. (Houston’s Damian Dunn is an alumnus, for example.)
Once on the sideline, however, Stackhouse fairly quickly revealed himself to be pretty good at drawing up something interesting offensively. Stackhouse’s Vanderbilt offenses have rarely been flawless, but from a low of 139th in 2019-20, the team steadily rose until cracking the top 30 with last year’s offense. Poke around any corner of the internet and you’ll find someone who raves about Stackhouse’s offensive designs.
Of course, an argument could be made that Stack’s offensive sets might be a little too complicated for the average college team. Using ShotQuality’s data, Vandy has consistently ranked above the national average in producing open threes, and up until the 2022-23 season, their rim-and-three rate was among the very best in the sport. However, they were a pretty frustrating watch because it seemed like they could never capitalize on all the ways they were getting open.
Here’s an example of the good side from February 2022, a game against future 2-seed Auburn that was scored as a 75-75 dead heat on SQ. (Actual result: 14-point loss.) Vanderbilt got off nine threes deemed wide-open, per Synergy; this was one of two that went down. It’s a really simple set but a beautiful one. Liam Robbins comes up to set a pick for Scotty Pippen Jr. Robbins acts like he’s rolling but then sets an off-ball screen for the team’s best shooter, Myles Stute, who gets possibly the most open three he got all season.
These shots were great because Vanderbilt’s shooters could hit from stationary positions. Once on the move, they were awful. For the most part under Stack, Vandy’s shot selection and spacing have been quite good and sometimes great. They simply don’t have the shot making to go with it, at least prior to 2022-23. Earlier in that 2021-22 season, the Dores played South Carolina at home in a game SQ scored as a nine-point win. They took 10 pull-up jumpers, at least six of which I would say had no defender within four feet of the shooter. One went in. This, an open look for the best player on the team, was not one of them.
Of all of Vandy’s on-court offense metrics, that might be the most telling. From 2019-20 to 2022-23, these are ShotQuality’s numbers for shot selection/spacing vs. shot making for the Commodores.
Shot selection + spacing ranking, 2019-20 to 2022-23: 9th, 107th, 91st, 134th
Shot making ranking, 2019-20 to 2022-23: 323rd, 199th, 266th, 162nd
Last year, the year when Vandy’s shot selection quietly was at its worst and they finished outside the top 100 in rim-and-three rate under Stackhouse for the first time, was the first year that VU had plus shot-making on the roster. Between Tyrin Lawrence (72nd-percentile in SQ’s Shot Making metric), Ezra Manjon (81st), and Myles Stute (84th), Vandy finally had multiple workable offensive options that could make tough buckets. Case in point: ranking 73rd-percentile in guarded jumper efficiency and in the 76th-percentile in runners, per Synergy. Late-clock bailouts like this one became more common than ever.
What this did, collectively, was cover up for a couple of other troubling trends on Vandy’s front. While the team put up its best shot volume under Stackhouse (44th in offensive TO%, 101st in OREB%), they posted their worst eFG% of his tenure, falling outside the top 200. They ranked 237th in 2PT% and 190th in 3PT%. Their Assist Rate fell to the 300s. Their offensive possession lengths were slower than ever before, their worst number since the second Bryce Drew season. Fast, fun, and real, this wasn’t; key players like Robbins and those previously mentioned made up for plentiful errors.
Heading into 2023-24, a late-season surge seemed to portend great things. Vanderbilt closed the 2022-23 season winning 10 of their final 12 regular season games, including four Quadrant 1 victories in six weeks after putting up five in the first three full seasons of Stack. They even made the NIT quarterfinals! Not too bad. Per Hoop-Explorer (the On being the final 15 games of the season), you can see the improvements: better 3PT% for both offense and defense, better 2PT% defense, and…well, that’s mostly it.
The offensive figure is more revealing, though: during that time period, it was the 13th-best figure in the sport. That, after ranking 96th-best over the first three months, was quite the jump.
Perhaps naturally, SQ was a bit more skeptical than most. Vanderbilt finished 84th in their ratings with an expected SQ record of 16-21, one of the largest gaps between actual W-L and expected in the sport. Those final 15 games, the ones Vandy went 12-3 in? SQ gave Vandy an expected record of 6-9 during that run, scoring only four of the games as outright Vandy victories. Key to this overperformance were shocking offensive runs from previously pedestrian players.
Ezra Manjon, February/March 2023: 126 ORtg on 23% Usage, 54% 2PT, 38% 3PT
Ezra Manjon, remainder of career: 104 ORtg on 25% Usage, 47% 2PT, 27% 3PT
Tyrin Lawrence, February/March 2023: 121 ORtg on 22% Usage, 60% 2PT, 47% 3PT
Tyrin Lawrence, remainder of career: 103 ORtg on 21% Usage, 55% 2PT, 29% 3PT
Liam Robbins, February/March 2023: 117 ORtg on 36% Usage, 42% 2PT, 61% 3PT
Liam Robbins, remainder of career: 104 ORtg on 27% Usage, 51% 2PT, 30% 3PT
Colin Smith, February/March 2023: 125 ORtg on 12% Usage, 52% 2PT, 43% 3PT
Colin Smith, remainder of career: 112 ORtg on 15% Usage, 45% 2PT, 35% 3PT
In the past, we’ve seen these performances turn into legitimate improvements. It’s always possible to see someone have a great final two months and become a superstar the next year. But: to go from zero plus offensive options to four overnight was, in retrospect, a bit of small-sample fun.
Fast-forward to today. If you go to Vanderbilt’s ShotQuality page at the time of publishing, you might be really confused by what you’ll see. But: I do think it’s at least somewhat real. The shot making is better than it’s ever been. That’s because the players are taking the most difficult, poorly-thought-out shots they have in the entire Stackhouse tenure.
Finally, we get to today. Vanderbilt is 4-8, with an offense barely cracking the top 200 and an eFG% nearly in the 300s. They get to the line well, don’t turn it over, and still take a lot of threes. The problem: the quality of the shots themselves. For the first time in five seasons, the Stackhouse system is producing objectively terrible possessions left and right. Players - not good ones - are having to twist themselves into making tougher shots than ever. How did we get here?
It’s worth noting, obviously, that Vanderbilt has been extraordinarily snake-bitten by injuries this year. Their preseason starting five didn’t get to play a single game where all five were healthy. Starting point guard Ezra Manjon missed a pair of games. Starting 2-guard Tyrin Lawrence missed four. Returner Colin Smith, who many were excited about, lasted all of seven games before going out for the year with an Achilles injury.
Now, for any team, a season-ending injury to a starter and players missing games left and right would cause some real adversity. To be sure, one can extend some sympathy Vandy’s way for these problems. We’re just 12 games into the new season and Stackhouse is already on his ninth starting lineup. That’s hard for pretty much any coach, and program, to deal with.
And yet. Part of playing in the SEC, and in any major conference, is having enough depth to work with for when injuries do come. Like it or not, Big Six teams should recruit and/or portal at a high-enough level to ensure they’ll be safe when their reservation for Injury City comes around. If you can’t recruit well, you better be a master of using the portal to fill out your roster. If you can’t portal well, you better be a heck of a recruiter. Ideally, you’d combine success at both sides of the offseason roster management game.
Recall the original theory of why Stackhouse was hired. He had no college coaching experience and zero ties to Nashville as a city, so the hope was that through his AAU and NBA connections (and, of course, the name power), recruits would be convinced to come play for Stackhouse in a similar fashion to how Penny Hardaway and Juwan Howard succeeded in getting blue-chip recruits to play for them at places blue-chip recruits historically haven’t come to.
To date, that’s not panned out. More so than college football, college basketball’s recruiting rankings are pretty easy to manipulate because of the smaller class sizes. It’s better to go by average star rating, and, well:
Excusing 2019 (a transition class post-Bryce Drew firing), Stackhouse has produced the four worst recruiting classes relative to the rest of the SEC that Vanderbilt has seen in over a decade. Even Drew managed to draw a pair of five-stars to Vanderbilt in his time on campus. Vanderbilt’s highest-rated recruit to date is Shane Dezonie, the 100th-ranked recruit in the 2022 class. He was the 20th-best recruit in the SEC alone. Dezonie played one season and barely 10 minutes a game for Vandy before transferring to a Temple team where he’s also a non-entity.
In fact, it’s hard to point out any Stackhouse recruiting success, in terms of recruits that were nationally relevant when recruited and had competitive offers. Of the five top recruits listed here, the only one who has panned out to date in college is Dylan Disu…who has panned out for a different team, Texas.
Alright, so you’ve had four straight crap recruiting classes. Whatever. You can make up for that problem in the portal by getting older impact pieces that cover up the holes in your recruiting plan. There’s a couple different ways to measure this, one of which is Evan Miyakawa’s pretty simple Incoming Transfers Class Rank among SEC teams:
2023: 11th
2022: 14th
You could go by Bart Torvik’s Transfer Points, which estimates the value added to your team from the portal:
2023: 10th
2022: 13th
2021: 10th
Considering that portal activity only really began to jump in the 2021 calendar year, it’s fair to expect a coach to take some time to adjust. By today, if you’re not recruiting freshmen very well, you better be hammering the portal. Considering that both Bryce Drew and Kevin Stallings could at least recruit competitively in the SEC and routinely ranked among the mid-pack, it says something that Stackhouse cannot recruit freshmen talent at all and appears to be moribund with his portal targets. Aside from Liam Robbins via Minnesota it’s hard to name one that’s worked out.
For convenience, we might as well line this up.
Vanderbilt’s recruiting of freshmen consistently ranks among the 3-4 worst in the SEC, with only Missouri (a portal monster) and Mississippi State (who underwent a coaching change and made last year’s NCAAT) being consistent competition in this regard.
Vanderbilt’s recruiting of the transfer portal consistently ranks among the bottom five in the SEC, and they were the only SEC team I clocked to rank in the bottom five in all three seasons in portal recruiting.
Combined, Vanderbilt regularly goes into an average season under Jerry Stackhouse with one of the 2-3 least-talented, lowest-ceiling rosters in the SEC.
Well, so much for the recruiting king everyone thought they’d hired in 2019.
Bart Torvik’s Talent Rating will say a different story, which is that the 2023-24 Vanderbilt roster ranks 9th in the SEC in terms of recruited talent. Let’s examine the cases below them.
Alabama, in 14th, has the best backcourt in the SEC (recruited via the portal) and regularly alternates between getting blue-chip recruits with getting blue-chip transfers. They’re in the top 15 in most metric systems.
Florida, in 13th, has a roster almost entirely made up of top-end transfers. They ranked #1 in EvanMiya’s class rankings for the portal. They’re in the top 40 of most metrics.
South Carolina, in 12th, had to remake their roster on the fly this offseason with four new transfers. It certainly seems to be working out, as they’re 11-1 and inside the KenPom top 70 for the first time since 2021.
Missouri, in 11th, is taking a step back this year but brought in a top-five portal class and will at least be competitive as a bottom-half SEC team.
Mississippi State, in 10th, is top 30 in KenPom and returned most of the key pieces from an NCAA Tournament 11 seed team.
Then there’s Vanderbilt, who has a mix of intriguing 3-star recruits, no plus transfers (their best one was Ven-Allen Lubin, a decent piece on a bad Notre Dame team), and lost six players to the portal. They also lost their best player in Liam Robbins. At 4-8, with multiple disastrous home losses in buy games, it’s hard to say it’s not working out. Wait a minute.
The 2023-24 Vanderbilt Commodores never had all their players available at the same time, but against Boston College on November 29, they had all but one of the preseason’s top pieces available. The starting backcourt that thrilled many, Ezra Manjon and Tyrin Lawrence, were playing together for the first time this season. And they proceeded to lose by 18 in a home game against a Big Six team that’s barely inside the KenPom top 100.
Of all games this year, including the mega-embarrassing loss to Presbyterian that portended really bad things to come, this one feels the most descriptive of Vanderbilt’s problems - both in 2023 and as a program - to me.
Early in the game, Vanderbilt’s already down by 12. Hey, it happens, sometimes you have a really bad start. But this possession’s quite emblematic of the whole game. I’ve included all 28 seconds of it below. The things you’re gonna notice is that there’s plenty of off-ball movement, a limited amount of standing around, multiple actions…and a possession that takes 28 seconds to result in a blocked midrange two, because none of these players are good enough to get open on their own.
Ezra Manjon, the player who ultimately takes the doomed shot, is in his fifth full season of college basketball. He was a no-star recruit that transferred in from UC Davis and is pretty easily this team’s best player, at least at this point. What Manjon is not is a shooter. He sits at a career 27% hit rate on threes, and per Synergy, he’s a 37% shooter on two-point jumpers.
In a vacuum, you can survive this if you have plus shooters around you. For two months in 2023, Vanderbilt did. Across the rest of the Stackhouse tenure, they haven’t. Vanderbilt has never cracked the top 100 in either 2PT% or 3PT%, and their peak ranking in eFG% was 108th in the COVID year. At the high-major level over the last two seasons, only four full-time starting point guards have hit fewer threes than Manjon.
Because defenses know they don’t need to worry about a Manjon jumper, they can crowd onto the actual shooters. Vanderbilt’s most common lineup right now features Manjon, Lawrence, Evan Taylor, Ven-Allen Lubin, and Carter Lang. Manjon we’ve covered; Carter Lang has not hit a single three in college. Lubin is 4-21 from three in college. So: your most frequent lineup features three non-shooters or minimal shooters.
Even Lawrence, at 29% for his career on 181 attempts, isn’t a plus shooter. The only players on the roster that really qualify are Taylor (38% on 390 attempts) and Tasos Kamateros (38% on 354), with freshman Jason Rivera-Torres (42% on 33) looking promising in limited action. South Carolina, who finished dead last in KenPom’s SEC rankings by a mile last year in part thanks to awful shooting, reloaded its roster with four shooters who’d made 100+ threes prior to this season. Vandy, who had every reason to load up for one big run at the Tournament, has two. In 2023.
It goes back to offseason roster management. It goes back to recruiting. It goes back to off-court, which reflects on-court, and marries the whole concept into what it is: a disaster.
You can see it in the dropping Rim and Three Rate from ShotQuality:
2019-20: 11th
2020-21: 26th
2021-22: 76th
2022-23: 193rd
2023-24: 315th
But most prominently, you can see it in how the only truly good finisher on the entire roster is Tyrin Lawrence. Lawrence sits at 65% on 240 rim attempts for his career. No other non-center is above 59%, and that player achieved his rim FG% in the Summit League, one of the worst defensive conferences in the sport. When Lawrence cannot attack the rim, Vanderbilt barely cracks the paint at all; just 25% of their attempts are at the rim when he’s off the court. That’s the fourth-lowest rate in the entire sport.
More than ever before, Vanderbilt’s formerly rim-and-three only offense is defaulting to a lot of floaters and midrange jumpers. These aren’t going in at all, ranking 275th-best in FG% (32.7%). While Vandy still ranks very highly in off-ball screen usage, they’ve hit new highs for plays in the “miscellaneous” play type (aka, nothing you did looks normal) and worst of all, 1-on-1 ISOs, ranking in the 81st-percentile of usage nationally. Look at how dire this one is against Boston College.
Actually, freeze it here:
For most of this possession, Lawrence doesn’t even come close to the three-point line. It’s as if he’s entirely out of the play. You’re essentially playing 4-on-5 here, and with two guys hanging out down low, even with more time on the play clock Manjon wouldn’t be likely to get off anything decent at the rim.
So: that’s your offense. We haven’t touched on defense because outside of a complete fluke year in 2021-22, that’s been atrocious every season under Stackhouse, which is its own problem. Vanderbilt’s 40th-place finish that season is the only time it’s finished in the top 125 of KenPom’s defensive efficiency rankings. That is its own failing, which could require separate investigation.
It’s almost not useful to even explore that side, because it all boils down to the same thing. Vanderbilt doesn’t get talented freshmen, so it’s reliant on a player development program that has produced one unmitigated success story (Scotty Pippen, Jr.), a couple of half-successes (Lawrence, Myles Stute, Jordan Wright), and a pair of success stories at other schools (Dylan Disu, Gabe Dorsey). That’s not enough to survive in this conference.
If you can’t recruit all that well, you need to hammer the portal and find success that way. Vanderbilt’s found two portal pieces - Liam Robbins and Ezra Manjon - that have played like good, high-end SEC players. (The jury is out on Lubin, who appears pretty useful.) But think of it this way: in terms of Stackhouse-era portal pieces, those are the only two players who have produced a PRPG! (Torvik’s Points Above Replacement metric) of +2.5 or above. The best season by a non-Pippen player, from 2021 to present, is Robbins’ ‘22-23, which was 29th-best in the SEC. The second-best, Manjon’s current season, is 50th. No other portal piece has cracked the top 150.
Stackhouse’s own coaching has appeared to crater this year, with an offense producing lower-quality possessions than at any other time during his tenure and the least-creative sets he’s used his entire career. The actual scheme of Vanderbilt’s offense still makes some sense, but the players required to run it aren’t on the roster. Really, they never have been.
This is a giant, giant mess, one that can now safely be said to be entirely of Stackhouse’s own doing. It’s only going to get worse in the short term. The SEC is expanding to 16 teams with Texas and Oklahoma joining next season, both of whom are objectively better jobs and programs than Vanderbilt. How do you fix this? Can you fix this, particularly at a school where the major athletics programs are producing their worst collective performance in decades?
Part two, coming next week, will attempt to answer these questions and more. See you then.