If Vanderbilt wants to save Derek Mason’s job, it will need to make a bowl game. There doesn’t seem to be any other way around that reality. The particularities of situations (injuries, bad officiating) could always shift the calculus, but barring something dramatic, “bowl game or bust” is the likely benchmark Mason must reach this season if he wants to continue his head coaching career. Otherwise, he will be on the market for a defensive coordinator position this December.
By Matt Zemek
No one in the Vanderbilt community needs an explanation about the precariousness of Vanderbilt football’s situation — as it relates to the status of the head coach, as it relates to the conflicts inside the athletic department, as it relates to how (and how much) donors want to support the program. Uncertainty is pervasive, and that is precisely the context in which changes are made unless the head coach delivers a season people can feel encouraged about.
It is close to impossible to look at everything that is — and isn’t — going on inside Vanderbilt’s walls and conclude that a 5-7 (non-bowl) season can save Mason’s job. It is reasonable to wonder if a 6-6 season will be enough, but 5-7 seems beyond the point of questioning. That won’t get it done.
How does Vanderbilt “get it done,” then, in 2018, and at least make a bowl game, thereby giving Mason a chance to stay on in Nashville?
Here are the three biggest keys:
1) SURE WITH SHURMUR
What the Tennessee Volunteers faced a few seasons ago with Josh Dobbs, the Commodores face this year with Kyle Shurmur. A program gets one more season with a talented quarterback before he tests the waters of the NFL and sees if he will sink or swim at the next level. There are times when Kyle Shurmur shows his promise. There are times when he doesn’t. An overlooked aspect of his 2017 season, however, is that the collapse of Vanderbilt’s defense in a number of games prevented Shurmur from being in a position to shape his team’s fate. It is easy to focus on the player himself when a season doesn’t turn out as well as everyone hopes, but just as a pitcher needs at least SOME run support (ask Jacob deGrom of the New York Mets), a quarterback needs his defense to keep situations manageable. In the middle third of last season, that clearly didn’t happen.
That subtext is important because it shows that Shurmur didn’t enter the final five to eight minutes of fourth quarters in one-possession games with chances to turn losses into wins. To an extent, the 2017 season was taken from his hands.
This season, assuming that more games will be up for grabs in the fourth quarter, Shurmur — whenever the opportunity presents itself — needs to maximize moments and provide the “it factor” difference Vanderbilt will need. He can’t be expected to bail out VU left and right, but he will need to turn at least one probable loss into a win, if not two. Vanderbilt will need to take at least one game which either looks tough on the schedule, or is unfavorable on the scoreboard midway through the fourth quarter, and turn it into a victory. The SEC is too competitive, and the margins of error too slim, to think that Vanderbilt can demolish the opposition and give Shurmur relaxing fourth quarters in which he just has to be a game manager.
No. This is the year for Shurmur to captain the ship in the fourth quarter of a tight game and lead the game-winning drives which will fundamentally alter how this season — along with Mason’s tenure — is remembered. Hopefully, he will have enough chances, which leads to…
2) SECONDARY IS PRIMARY
We know that Kansas State — which smothered Shurmur and the VU offense in September of last year — did not turn out to be as strong as most Bill Snyder-coached teams usually are. Nevertheless, it remains that Vanderbilt’s secondary was sensational in that game. VU corners made sharp breaks on the ball and busted up several passes. The VU secondary blanketed KSU’s receivers and demonstrated genuine dominance on the perimeter. It was one of the best games by any secondary one could possibly hope for. It was reasonable to be optimistic about the 2017 SEC season given the way the Commodores clamped down on Kansas State in the non-conference portion of the season.
Then came injuries and attrition… and nothing was ever the same after that.
It is hard to deny the notion that playing three tough opponents in a row — Alabama, Florida, Georgia — instead of meeting them in a more spread-out fashion, took some starch out of the Commodores. It is tough enough to play good teams at any point in the schedule, but when three huge games occur consecutively without a breather in between, the weight of a season can come crashing down on a team and an injury-plagued unit. That might be as good an explanation as any other for the erosion of the VU secondary as the 2017 campaign progressed.
2018, then, offers Mason and his defensive staff a chance to hit the reset button. No, we shouldn’t expect lockdown masterpieces akin to what the VU crew delivered against Kansas State, but as long as the floodgates don’t open for opponents, Vanderbilt can play games with scores in the high 20s and low 30s, the kinds of games Shurmur can win in the fourth quarter.
Shurmur’s success is central to Vanderbilt’s success, but the secondary — as the hinge-point unit of this defense — shares the stage with the Commodores’ quarterback.
3) THE PATH, EXAMINED
This key refers to the games Vanderbilt likely needs to win in order to reach six wins.
The first half of the 12-game schedule seems very clear-cut: Middle Tennessee, Nevada and Tennessee State look like wins. South Carolina, Notre Dame and Georgia look like losses. Assuming Vanderbilt is 3-3 at the midpoint of the season, the Dores need to find three wins in the second half of their season.
All six of those second-half games matter, but which ones are likely the gateways to success? The first two in the series of six: Florida and Kentucky.
Vanderbilt MUST split those games, at minimum. Here’s why.
If you notice the layout of the schedule, Vanderbilt doesn’t get an off week until November. On October 27, VU plays its final game before the off week at Arkansas. When an off week comes that late in the schedule, the final game before it is usually a loss if the opponent is reasonably tough. If the game is on the road, a defeat is even more probable. Vanderbilt probably won’t have much left in the tank at that point, so the Arkansas game will more realistically be slotted in the loss column. After the off week, Vanderbilt closes with Missouri, Ole Miss, and Tennessee, three winnable games. A refreshed team can make a pursuit of a 2-1 record in those three games. In 2016, Vanderbilt beat Ole Miss and Tennessee at home to make a bowl game. I wouldn’t recommend being 4-6 after 10 games, but if VU is 4-5 after nine, the Dores would have a chance to go 5-5 through 10 and then merely need a split against the Rebels and Vols to go bowling. Being 5-5 through 10 games would enable Vanderbilt to shoot for a 7-5 season, which would definitely represent a successful season.
Very simply, then, VU can’t go 4-5 through nine games — or 5-5 through 10 — if it doesn’t at least split the Florida-Kentucky pair of games following the road trip to Georgia and preceding the “exhaustion game” at Arkansas before the early-November rest break.
What adds to the significance of the Florida game is that this is the first year with Dan Mullen at the helm for the Gators. Vanderbilt needs to pounce on Florida not just for the sake of winning one game in one season, but to undercut Mullen’s tenure and prevent Florida from stabilizing as a program. If given a choice between beating Florida and Kentucky, Florida would be the better opponent to pick off.
Nevertheless, if Vanderbilt does what it is largely expected to do in the first six games of this schedule, a Florida-Kentucky split will enable the Commodores to enter the final three weeks of the season with everything to play for. A Florida-Kentucky sweep, the goal this team should shoot for, would make a bowl game almost impossible to miss.
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