Why Mark Byington is confident in Vanderbilt's March Madness hopes despite Texas loss
Today at 09:57 PM
Vanderbilt basketball has been a consistently feisty team in the very competitive SEC all season, but almost everyone in the conference has had its ups and downs.
After a hot streak at the end of February and the beginning of March, where Vanderbilt won three straight games against ranked teams in Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Missouri, the Commodores have fallen on hard times again. Two consecutive defeats against Arkansas and Georgia to end the regular season were made worse by a sluggish showing on Wednesday during a 79-72 loss to Texas in the first round of the SEC Tournament.
Many people thought that Vanderbilt had played itself off of the bubble with that hot streak, but three losses in a row may have inched it back closer to the cut line. Despite another loss on Wednesday, head coach Mark Byington is still very confident that the Commodores will end up in the bracket on Sunday, according to Joe Gaither of Sports Illustrated.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s the question on everybody’s mind,” the Vanderbilt head coach said. “What the Selection Committee does is they look at your entire season. When you do that, our top-25 wins, our quad one wins, being in this league, showing how good of basketball we can play. We beat a lot of teams that are probably going to be 1 or 2 seeds this year.”
Byington also added that injuries have played a big part in some of these late losses for Vanderbilt.
“We’re a little bit banged up right now,” Byington said of Vanderbilt’s injuries. “I anticipate us being fully healthy in the next couple days. Then we will look like we looked maybe a week and a half ago. We’ve played great basketball the entire year. But I think we had a stretch there in February where I think we were one of the best 20 teams in the country. We’ll get back to that with the next opportunity.”
Vanderbilt had another three-game losing streak earlier in February, although those losses came against Auburn, Kentucky and Tennessee, so there’s no shame in that.
This Vanderbilt basketball team still has plenty of wins under its belt this season, including home wins over Kentucky and Tennessee back in January. Those victories combined with some strong metrics on Vanderbilt’s resume should get it safely into the tournament on Sunday.
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