Dec. 2, 2010
Quick Slant is an array of brief insights and occasionally opinionated overviews of collegiate athletics in general and the Vanderbilt Commodores in particular.
These are exciting times. We’ve got two excellent basketball teams and are in the midst of an important search for a head football coach.
- You are going to see the phrase “change the football culture” a hundred times over the next year. David Williams has challenged our entire administrative team – or ordered if you prefer – to rethink everything pertaining to our football program. Everything. Some things are easy no-brainers, other things much tougher but rest assured that we are trying to start from a blank slate. Keep the good, jettison the broken. Yes, we realize that winning games is a huge piece of changing the culture and yes, we understand you may have heard this before and will believe it when you see it. Stay tuned.
- One of our good guys recently received word of a terrific and much-deserved honor. Basketball alum Jerry Southwood will be inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. Southwood, who has been the glue of the Vanderbilt Rebounders group for many years, will be inducted March 23 at the state’s 50th awards banquet. Jerry is too modest to admit that he led Evansville Bosse to the 1962 state championship – a team that had four future Division I student-athletes.
- And speaking of big honors, did you notice our announcement the other day that Associate Head Coach/Pitching Coach Derek Johnson has been named the ABCA/Baseball America Assistant Coach of the Year? If you want to see some impressive achievements, check out that release on vucommodores.com. DJ will be honored at the group’s January convention.
- It is difficult to provide factual information during high-profile coaching searches. Why? Because many of the top candidates don’t want to be identified publicly as being interested, fearing such exposure will damage their home campus reputations, hinder their recruiting efforts or risk embarrassment if they don’t get an offer. The fear of the searching institution is that public exposure will drive a potential star hire underground, never to resurface. There is always a batch of up-and-comers that crave the publicity because they want the world to know they are head coach material. Often it is from this bunch that the partially true rumors flourish. Someone gets a preliminary “feeler” and soon there is an over-blown public report. And sometimes there isn’t even a feeler, just phony self-hype.