Tag Archives: vanderbilt
Vanderbilt basketball takes a hit
After losing Sheldon Jeter due to a transfer this spring, Kevin Stallings’ Vanderbilt Commodores lost two starters this week. The team’s leading rebounder last season, Kevin Bright, is off to play professional basketball in Germany, while Kedren Johnson, maybe the team’s best player, has been suspended from the team and is no longer enrolled at the university.
Vandy basketball may have been on a downswing after last season, but there were pieces to build around. Now, though, it looks like the tough times will last a bit longer at Memorial Gym.
Vanderbilt coach Franklin: I recruit unborn children (via Fox Sports)
In James Franklin’s world, it’s never too early to make a recruiting pitch.
On Monday, the Vanderbilt head football coach admitted that he routinely sells the scholarship virtues of Commodore athletics to expecting parents, prior to the birth of their son or daughter.
“If I see a 6-foot-6 man walking in the mall with his wife, and she’s 6-2 and she’s pregnant, I’ll go up and offer their unborn child,” Franklin told The Tennesseean.
“I’m not exaggerating. I do that all the time. If I go to speak at an elementary school, if I’m out at a restaurant, we kind of have fun with it. It’s about developing a relationship with people. It’s about getting them connected with Vanderbilt. It’s about making people laugh and telling a story and having fun. It’s about having a sense of humor and not being some robot coach that I don’t want to be.”
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The eminently personable and sometimes controversial Franklin has enjoyed an interesting two-year run in the college football spotlight.On the field, Vanderbilt is riding a seven-game winning streak — the longest current run of any SEC program. Plus, for 2011 and ’12, the Commodores reached back-to-back bowl games for the first time in school history. … Read More
(via Fox Sports)
(HT: Laura)
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Related
James Franklin’s Recruiting Strategy: Your Wife Better Be Smokin’
From morning to night, Vanderbilt stages a Signing Day worth celebrating (via Yahoo! Sports)
In a rare quiet moment in the Vanderbilt war room Wednesday, Ava Franklin walked in and was overtaken by curiosity.
“What are the balloons for?” asked the impossibly cute, 5-year-old daughter of the Commodores’ head coach.
For the National Signing Day party, she was told.
Ava thought for a second, then delivered the perspective-packed question of the afternoon, “What’s Signing Day?”
You’ll find out soon enough, kid. But if you must know now …
Signing Day is what has obsessed your father and his colleagues for months. It is what gets him into the office before you awaken, and gets him home after you go to sleep. It is a high holy day in the college football world, a festival of hope for fans and a culmination of dreams for players.
And on Wednesday at your daddy’s office, Ava, Signing Day went like this: … Read More
(via Yahoo! Sports)
College football bowl schedule released

The full bowl schedule, including times and broadcast networks, is here. Some highlights, in chronological order: Continue reading
News clips
Spending all day on the road meant I got to hear all the daytime sports radio I could handle. Thrilling, I know. I did pick up a few interesting nuggets, though:
– If Johnny Manziel wins the Heisman Trophy this year, as experts now expect, he will be the first freshman to do so. He won’t be the youngest winner, though. That distinction belongs to Mark Ingram, Jr.
– Apparently there’s some sort of adderall flap surrounding the Philadelphia Eagles and other NFL players. All the obvious issues aside, ProFootballTalk.com’s Mike Florio said that he thinks the adderall story is a cover up. Because the NFL has a policy of not commenting or elaborating on players’ positive drug tests, the players are free to say whatever they’d like about the test. Florio thinks that adderall is the convenient cover story du jour for players who actually tested positive for a more controversial substance.
– Kentucky hired Florida State defensive coordinator Mike Stoops to serve as Joker Phillips’ replacement at the football head coach position. While Kentucky local sports talk radio listeners generally approved of the hire, citing the successes of the Stoops family and Mike’s own rapid improvement of the FSU defense, no one mentioned the only factor that matters right now for the future success of UK football: program funding. Don’t forget that the UK athletic department just spent more on a preseason basketball pep rally than it did on an entire year of football recruiting. For Stoops’ sake, I hope he negotiated a substantial increase in funding for the football program. If not, his pedigree and resume will be irrelevant.
– Before leaving Army for Duke, Mike Krzyzewski interviewed at Vanderbilt but didn’t take the job because the VU athletic director at the time, fearing media exposure of an ongoing search, wouldn’t let Coach K visit the campus.
ALDLAND Podcast
The end of November is always exciting, as teams from the Big Ten and ACC take the court to decide which conference is superior. The Big Ten is on a three year winning streak, and looks to continue its dominance with a few top five teams taking the court. Listen as ALDLAND contributor Marcus Paschall and I break down the matchups and give our thoughts on who we think will win. There’s also some discussion of how much longer James Franklin will continue to coach Vanderbilt. I hope you will forgive me if the podcast sounds choppy at times, as I was cooking dinner while recording it. Guy’s gotta eat, ya dig?
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ALDLAND college football weekend update, part 2
After the aforementioned noon games, Tennessee visits Vanderbilt for a 7:00 pm (eastern) game in which the Vols will try to get their first SEC win of the year. UT is 0-6 in conference, while Vandy is 4-3 and already bowl-eligible.
In fact, Tennessee’s only SEC win in the last two years was an overtime win over the Commodores in Knoxville that absolutely should not have ended the way it did. (In case you’ve forgotten: https://aldland.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/moonshine-hangover-what-happened-at-the-end-of-vandyut-last-night.)
For the Commodores, a win over their in-state rival always would be sweet. A win tonight also would guarantee Vanderbilt winning overall and conference records. (It also probably would result in the firing of yet another SEC coach predicated on a loss to Vanderbilt.) A good thing for a program that really looks like it’s on a legitimate upward climb even within one of the deepest conference divisions in the country.
Video: Inside Vanderbilt’s 17-13 win over Auburn
With the most notable exception being our podcasts, this site largely has been about reading and writing. As it has developed, I see its two main functions as a) distilling the ever-increasing amount of sports writing by highlighting just a few of the best pieces and b) providing an independent platform for the relating of personal sports opinions, experiences, and other reactions. Because our A/V crew unionized and promptly went on strike earlier this year, we almost exclusively perform the second function, the real creative one, through the written word. I think that usually is a good thing, and doing that type of writing is part of the fun of this site.
There are plenty of times, though, when video can be a better form of communication than text alone. (See, for example our Silent Film Series, currently on an extended intermission.) My sense is that video is still trying to find its place in an increasingly social and mobile digital world. My sense also is that Vanderbilt’s athletic department is doing as good a job as any program of using social media in general and video in particular to provide to multiple important audiences– alumni, current students, and prospective students– a real inside look into their program. One of the most successful examples came when a video of Coach James Franklin surprising a senior walk-on football player with a scholarship went moderately viral this summer.
The latest example is perhaps less momentous and less likely to spread far beyond the Vanderbilt community, but the extended highlight reel of the team’s win over Auburn this past Saturday offers a pretty compelling and intimate look at the gameday experience through the team’s eyes:
A minute for the Minutemen: What’s happening in Amherst this fall?
The better question might be, What’s happening away from Amherst this fall?
Before the 2012 college football season began, I surveyed the schedules of some of the teams I wanted to see in live action. While I must’ve noticed the common opponent on the Vanderbilt and Michigan schedules, it wasn’t until I heard a broadcast of UMass at Western Michigan that I knew there had to be a story here. Who won’t these guysmen play? (And, more generally, UMass has a football team?) Keep reading…

In James Franklin’s world, it’s never too early to make a recruiting pitch.
