Feb. 25, 2007
By Will Matthews
Basketball Recap: Vanderbilt 67 Kentucky 65
Baseball Recap: Vanderbilt 7 Boston College 6
NASHVILLE – When Vanderbilt Head Basketball Coach Kevin Stallings was asked during Sunday’s post game press conference whether he could remember ever having won a game in which his team’s opponents shot 58 percent from the field, his reaction just about said it all.
“Did they shoot 58 percent?” Stallings asked incredulously. “I told you our defense was good.”
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Stallings then paused as the gathered media contingent erupted into laugher to look a bit deeper into the stat sheet that lay in front of him.
“Wow,” was all Stallings could muster, before quipping, “But we held them to 60 percent shooting in the second half.”
Then Stallings got serious.
“As a matter of fact, that is a great question and the answer to that question is no, I don’t,” Stallings said.
And what about you Tubby Smith, head basketball coach at Kentucky? Do you remember ever having coached a game in which your team shoots 58 percent but loses?
“No, Smith said. “I have coached a lot of games and no.”
It was that kind of day for the Commodores Sunday, and the magic that seemed to spur Vanderbilt to an improbable 67-65 win over Kentucky in basketball – the team’s fourth straight defeat of the Wildcats – wasn’t contained to Memorial Gym.
Literally minutes before Vanderbilt took its first lead of the day in the final minute against Kentucky, Commodore shortstop Ryan Flaherty hit a walk off, two-run homerun in the bottom of the ninth inning next door at Hawkins Field to vault the top ranked and undefeated Vanderbilt baseball team to a 7-6 win over Boston College in a game they, too, had trailed in all day.
“And the thing is, Flaherty called his shot,” Vanderbilt Head Baseball Coach Tim Corbin said. “He told the trainer in the dugout, `You ready to win the game?’ And he steps up there and wins the game. This team always thinks they are going to win the game. We were down 5-1 and they certainly weren’t thinking we were going to lose the game.”
And it is that kind of confidence that seems to permeate the entire Vanderbilt campus right now. For a school that boasts high academic standards but which often is nothing more than an afterthought when the discussion turns to athletics, winning is becoming quite the commonplace occurrence.
“It doesn’t get any more exciting than this,” Vanderbilt Chancellor Gordon Gee said. “A day like today is what you hope for when it comes to college sports. Today it is particularly great to be a Commodore.”
Despite shooting just 41 percent from the field for the day and despite facing a nine-point halftime deficit, Vanderbilt came away victorious on the hardwood when Derrick Byars grabbed a rebound off his own missed foul shot and scored, giving the Commodores a season sweep of Kentucky for the second straight year.
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Vanderbilt’s four-game win streak against Kentucky matches its longest ever in the series. The last time the Commodores took four straight from Kentucky were the 1972-73 and 1973-74 seasons.
“Everybody knows that Kentucky is Kentucky and they have dominated this league for decades,” said Byars, an SEC Player of the Year candidate who rebounded from a lackluster first half to score 21 of his 26 points the second half. “For us to do that, with the team that they still have right now, is something. They are a tremendous basketball team. It is significant for our program. You can see it going in a different direction right now and hopefully we can sustain that for the next couple of contests.”
Stallings said the key to his club’s success against Kentucky the past two years has been its ability to execute down the stretch, a trait that is indicative of a team that is learning how to win and which is beginning to expect to win each time it takes the floor.
“I think our team has been pretty good this year in the stretch run of games,” Stallings said. “I think that has been a strength of ours. Tonight was no exception. We talked about it in the under four minute timeout that this is when we play our best, when we really play well is at this point and our kids did the job there in the last couple minutes of the game.”
The baseball team clearly expects to play well when it counts the most as well, Commodore fans are beginning to expect the same and Corbin, for one, says these are fun times to be a part of the Vanderbilt athletic program.
“I like the fact that we have such a good school academically and that we are successful athletically as well. It is a real accomplishment when you can take a school and be so good in so many areas. It just makes everyone feel pretty good. It is good for Vanderbilt people who can keep their chin up and say, `yeah we’ve got good students but we have good athletics, too.'”
