Vanderbilt player freaks out at half-time, motivates team to win (Video)
By Mike Dyce
Last week the Vanderbilt Commodores were taking on the Massachusetts Minutemen in a battle of the longest team names. (Just a joke, don’t know if that is true.) Vanderbilt plays in the SEC, you know, the best football conference in the history of college football. U-Mass on the other hand plays in the Mid-American Conference and came into the game with an 0-3 record.
Clearly Vanderbilt should be head and shoulders ahead of U-Mass so when they came into the locker room at half-time with a 10-7 lead they were understandably not thrilled with their first half performance.
That is when a quiet and solemn locker room was disrupted by senior offensive lineman Wesley Johnson got up and started throwing things. he starts with his helmet against a locker and then his chair as he screams about his team not doing enough.
Head coach James Franklin then decides to get up and give a calmer speech. The Commodores then went out and played solid in the second half and ended up winning the game 24-7.
Here is the kicker, after the game head coach calls it the “prettiest win he ever saw in his life.”
Really? You’re an SEC team and boasting about beating an 0-3 MAC team? The team then jumps up and down and celebrates, there is some water throwing reminiscent of the champagne showers we’ve been seeing in baseball this month as teams clinch the playoff berths and division titles.
The team is 0-2 this season in the SEC, I guess when you’re at the bottom of college football’s toughest conference you celebrate wins against 0-3 MAC teams.
Maybe this fuels them to have a solid season and turn around their fortunes in the SEC this season. In all fairness they’ve been close in their two losses in the SEC. They barely lost to Ole Miss in the season opener. A 75-yard touchdown run with about a minute left in the game gave the Rebels a win over the Commodores, less than 30 seconds after they had taken the lead. That had to be heartbreaking.
After giving up 28 unanswered points to the South Carolina Gamecocks, the Commodores scored 10 points in the last 4 minutes of the second quarter to enter the locker room with some momentum. They added another 15 points in the fourth quarter and held South Carolina to one score in the second half but it wasn’t enough to come back and win.