Vanderbilt has now blown up the SEC in two sports after knocking off Tennessee in basketball
By Quinn Everts
Vanderbilt cares not for order in the College Football Playoff or the NCAA Tournament. They exist to cause chaos in the SEC, and they've done just that.
A few months after Diego Pavis ran all over Alabama to upend the conference in football, Justin Edwards and the Dores men's basketball team took down No. 6 Tennessee, 76-75, adding more madness to an already mad season in the SEC.
The power balance in the SEC is outrageous — Auburn remains ahead of everyone else by a few miles, but "everyone else" seems to be separated by a few meters... if that.
Tennessee is a better team than Vanderbilt, but this game wasn't a fluke by any means. Winning on the road will be a tall task all season for SEC teams, as we've already seen numerous times. Winning at all is tough — and the 'Dores are now 15-3 with a signature win on their resume. That's a tourney team if you ask me.
It has been 0 days since the SEC was thrown into chaos
And before today, it had been exactly three days; on Tuesday, Ole Miss beat Alabama and Missouri beat Florida. Today, Vanderbilt showed that it deserves to be in the conversations that it seems like 90 percent of the conference has been in all season; tournament team.
The Commodores are a top 50 KENPOM team and are holding their own in the best conference in college basketball.
After years of irrelevance across sports, this school has become one of the most important in both football — where it essentially kept Alabama out of the CFP — and in basketball, where they just handed the Vols their second conference loss of the season, putting them right in the middle of the conference, which is not where they expected to be at this juncture.