Know the foe: Digging deep on the very hot Vanderbilt Commodores
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Recruiting: Alabama seeking to flip offensive targets
BamaInsider.com managing editor Kyle Henderson asked five key questions about the very hot 3-0 Vanderbilt Commodores for Saturday's contest, and Chris Lee of Vandy Sports answers them.
1. What Makes Vanderbilt's Defense Go?
It's a combination of a bunch of things.
First, coach Derek Mason needed a few years to get the kinds of players he wanted in terms of size and speed. To keep it simple, Mason wants big guys who can run. Look across the field--there's 6-foot-5 Jonathan Wynn at one end, 6-foot-5 Nifae Lealao in the middle of the line, 6-foot-3 Oren Burks at middle linebacker, 6-foot-3 corner JoeJuan Williams locking down one side of the field, and guys behind them like a pair of true freshman defensive linemen in 6-foot-6 Dayo Odeyingbo and 6-foot-4 Jalen Pinkney.
And these guys are fast. Maybe not Alabama fast, but fast enough to play at a high level, for sure.
Second, they're smart, and they're mostly his guys. Mason talked on Tuesday about how the defense can now understand two or three times what it could when it got there. Mason admitted he threw too much at them in Year 1. He pulled back and gradually started challenging them with more info again, and here we are.
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On the field, you see that play out in multiple ways beyond what I've said. What you're seeing with VU's pass defense is that Mason now has guys like 6-foot-3 Charles Wright and 6-foot-2 Dare Odeyingbo who can really get after the passer, and guys like Williams, Tre Herndon, Ryan White, Arnold Tarpley and LaDarius Wiley who can really cover--even when VU couldn't get pass rush against Kansas State, quarterback Jesse Ertz simply ate the ball after having an eternity to throw because nobody was open.
Vanderbilt has not been tested with athletes like Alabama's and we should rightfully suspend some judgment until then, but right now it's very, very difficult to find the flaws.
2. How much culture change has there been since the arrival of Derek Mason?
A bunch.
As much credit as James Franklin deserves for building a foundation for success--and Franklin is a phenomenal coach who deserves every bit of credit for Vandy's back-to-back Top 25 finishes--he also left Mason with a mess. He brought in four recruits who are now all in prison due to a terrible on-campus rape scandal. While that gets pushed under the rug at a lot of places, Vanderbilt takes those things really seriously.
That one scandal alone absolutely wrecked progress with funding football, and is primarily responsible for the fact that Vanderbilt has not renovated a stadium that, as Alabama fans will discover on Saturday, is absolutely in need of major work.
