All Good Things Must Come to an End

I choose to blame Vince Gill.

For those of you who didn't catch the games, or weren't paying attention, Country Music Megastar, and resident Nashvillian, Vince Gill was present at both Belmont's 1-point loss to Duke on Thursday night and Vanderbilt's loss to Siena on Friday. Apparently he cursed the victors of those games as well as Duke fell to West Virginia and Siena lost to surprise team Villanova. Obviously I don't really blame Vince, most of that can be put on the guys that took the floor posing as the Vanderbilt men's basketball team.

Disappointment is probably the most accurate way to describe Friday night's game. I once heard that adversity doesn't create character, it reveals it, and from the looks of it, we didn't have much character as a team. I could spend hours trying to figure out why we played so poorly and let a team that on paper we should have dominated impose their will upon us. We had shown an inability to stop slashing type guards over the course of the season, but I really thought that was something we had worked to correct. I was mistaken.

Fortunately for this team, it's not back to the drawing board. While we will obviously miss Shan, the other three graduating seniors don't appear to be irreplacable. As a team that entered this season unranked and picked to finish 5th in the East this season was by all means a success. However, for anyone that was able to watch this team play in Memorial Gym, you got the feeling that this team was really something special. The challenge for Kevin Stallings in the coming months will be figuring out to transfer the way this team plays at home to opponents' and neutral courts. Yes, it sucks to lose in the first round of the tournament to some joke university on the backside of nowhere, but the future is certainly bright.

I'm going to take a few days to transition the blog to baseball season, so look for a post around the middle of the coming week. Unfortunately, the baseball team lost its first series since the 2005-2006 season this weekend at Alabama. Hopefully I haven't incurred the wrath of the collegiate sports gods, brining misfortune upon any team I blog about. However, if that is the case, I will reopen the blog writing frequently and exclusively about UT football.

What a ride. Shan, Red, Ross, and Alan, thanks for the memories,.

As Always,
Go 'Dores!