Vanderbilt Loses to Siena; Coach Stallings Saved Ignominy of Being Indiana Coach

When Jamie Graham outscores your starting backcourt...You know how this ends.

Vanderbilt, doing their best to enforce the label that they can't win away from Memorial Gym, got toasted in Tampa by MAAC powerhouse Siena, 83-62. The Commodores were led by starting guards Alex (Fucking) Gordon and Jermaine Beal, who came in to the game averaging 19 points and 8 assists combined. Against Siena, they went 2-12 from the field and chipped in 6 points and 5 assists. This put their combined production behind that of reserve guard Jamie Graham (1.5 ppg, 4 mins per game), who somehow was able to score 6 points in 10 minutes against the Saints' "smothering" defense.

To be fair, it wasn't just Beal and Gordon's failure that led to the defeat. Siena guards Kenny Hasbrouck and Tay Fisher used an apparent pact with Satan to go 15 of 20 from the field and score 49 points. Three other players finished in double figures for the Saints, who were then promptly blown out by Villanova, showcasing the Big East's superiority over the MAAC.

This is even worse news for Coach Kevin Stallings, who reportedly had been on a short list of candidates for Kelvin Sampson's old job at Indiana. After a blowout and a less than stellar away record (see previous posts, any article about Vandy basketball over the past month) he seems to be out of the running. Though Stallings would probably have welcomed a return to Indiana (he's a Purdue grad and former player), would you really want to coach any sport in the Big Ten? I mean sure it's great to get to a championship game every year, but then comes the eventual blowout loss to an SEC, Big East, or Pac-10 team and media scrutiny that accompanies it. And yes, much of the point of this paragraph is to piss off everyone else that writes for this blog.

And suddenly this is all I have left.