NASHVILLE — A crippling ice storm swept through Tennessee over the weekend, bringing untold millions of dollars in damages across the state.
Here in the capital city, the crystallized carnage is immediately obvious to anyone commuting across Nashville’s crunched-up roads. The area lacks the infrastructure to immediately deal with a once-in-a-generation ice storm. Snapped tree limbs litter every roadway and corner. Trees have toppled, and in some cases, destroyed homes. It looks like it will take some parts of the region months to recover from the wreckage. The town is coated in frost; the big chill from Winter Storm Fern has put a vice grip on Music City.
But despite Mother Nature’s wrath, they still opted to play basketball here on Tuesday night.
The natural disaster had an impact on Vanderbilt’s men’s basketball program too, but Fern didn’t affect the team’s capacity to play one of its best games of the season. Commodores coach Mark Byington has been without power at his home for days. His reward for guiding 18th-ranked Vandy to an 80-55 drubbing of Kentucky on Tuesday? Another night on the air mattress in the office.
In fact, Byington squeezed in an interview for this story shortly after the game ended. He was in a rush to get home, take care of his cat and grab a fresh set of clothes for Wednesday. The motion-sensor lights inside his office provided a tougher challenge for Byington overnight than Kentucky; Byington slept less than four hours Sunday into Monday because he couldn’t stop unintentionally triggering the lights on, only to have to get up every time and turn them off.
One of the nation’s most underrated coaches is helping author one of the best Vanderbilt seasons of the past 20 years. He’s also trying to lay like a mummy just to reach six hours of sleep.
Why not manually change the settings?
“Everybody keeps saying that, but, I mean, look at me: I don’t know how to [fix] stuff like that,” Byington told CBS Sports, the computer screen behind him showing power outages all around Nashville, his neighborhood included.
Byington doesn’t give himself enough credit. The man is an adaptor. At 49, he’s flipped the Vanderbilt situation immediately after the failed Jerry Stackhouse era. Tuesday night’s 25-point win was Vandy’s third-largest ever over Kentucky. (The Dores are 51-158 lifetime vs. UK.)
Vandy had a three-game slide earlier this month. Losses to Texas and Arkansas on the road sandwiched a frustrating 98-94 home defeat to Florida. But the Commodores have now won two straight against Mississippi State and UK by a combined 57 points. They’re 18-3 and rank 12th at KenPom. It seems this team is back to Final Four Contender status.
The biggest reason? The smallest player. Sophomore point guard Tyler Tanner is listed at 6-feet, but he admitted to me he’s an inch shorter than that. Tanner cuts a lithe figure, weighing less than 170 pounds while playing with the verve of a roving linebacker. He’s also one of the most improved sophomores in the country. Tanner had a team-high 19 points in Tuesday’s win, in addition to five assists, four rebounds and four steals. In a year downright loaded with point guards, Tanner is still in the running to be an All-American.
Nobody saw this coming.
The speedster floor general dictated Tuesday night’s festivities practically from the outset, ensuring Kentucky never even threatened to have a lead. UK has taken on some bad losses this season, but the two worst have come right here in Nashville: Tuesday night’s drubbing and the ghastly 94-59 no-show vs. Gonzaga in December at Bridgestone Arena.
“His decision-making is elite, like he can get where he wants on the floor, but he’s in command of the game,” UK coach Mark Pope said of Tanner.
The sophomore could become one of the must-watch players in the back half of college basketball’s season, and he’s got an easy story to root for.
Local kid makes good — and is getting better. Fast.
Tanner grew up in Brentwood, Tennessee, all of 15 minutes from Memorial Gymnasium. But he wasn’t a huge Vanderbilt fan. He didn’t go to all the games. He didn’t go to most of the games.
“I came to a couple,” he said. “Sometimes you didn’t want to come because they would lose.”
Tanner has removed that expectation from the equation. His play and Vanderbilt’s success was enough to get Memorial Gym close to 80% capacity on a night when a lot of people couldn’t or wouldn’t leave their homes to brave the drive in gelid conditions.
A three-star prospect, Tanner’s only high-major offer came from Vanderbilt. Murray State and Belmont were his other two finalists. But it wasn’t Byington who offered him the scholarship. Stackhouse’s parting gift to the school was his belief in Tanner three and half years ago. When Stackhouse was fired in March 2024, Tanner didn’t de-commit. He wanted to take a chance on himself and opt for the only high-major that gave him a shot. Byington got the job after coaching James Madison to a 32-win season and the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
“When I took over, you’re evaluating the roster, and you’re like, all right, who can compete in the SEC?” Byington said.
He admits he overlooked Tanner in his initial roster evaluation.
“I really didn’t put much focus on him. If he wanted to leave, just knowing, ‘Hey, I wanted the old coach,’ I wasn’t going to fight it.”
And then Byington actually had his first real conversation with Tanner and his family.
“I sat down with him for like five minutes, and I’m like, ‘I might have just met the best young man I’ve ever met in my life,'” Byington said.
It quickly turned into a “we can’t lose him” situation. As Byington soon discovered, Tanner would make the drive to campus and play pickup with Vanderbilt’s players under Stackhouse. This was when he was still in high school, and as the story goes, there were times when he was the best player on the floor. That intrigued Byington, but he wasn’t an initial believer that Tanner would be a true contributor as a freshman.
And then Tanner started outplaying every guard regularly in practice on a Vanderbilt team that would earn a 10-seed and reach the NCAAs for the first time in eight years. Last year, Tanner averaged a mere 5.7 points in 20.5 minutes per game, but the big signal to his value was the fact that he spent more time on the floor in close games with less than four minutes remaining than all the other guys on the team.
“I trusted him last year more than anybody else, and that was him at 18 years old,” Byington said. “Fast forward to where we are now. Every time you put more on him, he can handle it. … His decision-making with the ball has just gone to a way higher level than it was before. So that’s his intellect.”
Tanner’s up to 17.5 points, 5.2 assists and 2.4 steals per game this season. Vanderbilt’s assist-to-turnover ratio is 1.90, best in the SEC and top-seven in college basketball. According to EvanMiya.com, Tanner is college hoops’ only player who swipes at least four steals per 100 possessions, dishes at least nine assists per 100 possessions and is shooting better than 60% on true shooting percentage.
And when you watch him play, there’s never caution or inhibition. His smaller size is a weapon, his speed a superpower, his playmaking the fuel for Vanderbilt’s top-10 offense.
“I give most of the credit for what I do to just confidence,” Tanner said. “So much work was put in, so many reps, that I would be selling myself short if I didn’t believe in myself.”
He’s doing it while carrying more responsibility this month than ever. Vanderbilt is down two key guards: Duke Miles (16.6 ppg) and Frankie Collins (7.8 ppg), yet it’s still building a case as the best team in the SEC. Kentucky entered Tuesday night’s game on a five-game winning streak, best in the SEC.
It never had a shot. Vandy led wire-to-wire with Tanner the tone-setter.
“We came into it wanting to have that edge to us,” Tanner told CBS Sports. “We had that edge against Mississippi State as well, but we just wanted to replicate that and come out and make them quit early.”
Tanner seems to thrive on miscalculations in team scouts. He’s a diminutive dynamo, and his speed is what kills a lot of teams’ hopes at stymying the Commodores.
“As a team and just for me personally, we see ourselves as underdogs,” Tanner said. “We still don’t think everybody takes us seriously, and that fuels us to go show the whole country, like in these big games, we can play with anybody. I think we’re one of the best teams in the country.”
When teams that typically don’t occupy the top end of the rankings start winning at a large scale, the general sports public can be hard to convince, initially. We’ve seen it a bit this year with 20-1 Nebraska. But the Cornhuskers are for real and so is Vanderbilt. If you have a point guard who has upper-echelon talent, intelligence and unwavering optimism about his teammates, you are going to have a shot almost every time out.
“He never has a bad day. I mean, he walks in every single day, happy and talkative and he lifts everybody up,” Byington said. “The best thing he does is he helps the temperature of our team stay that way. He lifts everybody else around him, and he’s always that way. And so when there’s adversity, he’s the same person. He never wavers on who he is.”
Byington added that Tanner is the rare player who makes him a better person. The power in that and the power of belief have been key factors in this team having its best start in almost 20 years and pacing toward one of its best seasons ever.
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