IHTIT: Tennessee Vols vs. Vanderbilt Commodores Basketball Preview 2025
It's Hoops Time in America's Worst Gym (TM)
Recently
After a dismal first half of shooting, Tennessee (#6 AP, 16-1, 3-1 SEC) claimed a 74-56 win over #23 Georgia on Wednesday night. The Vols trailed at halftime, but roared out of the locker room with a 25-4 run to start the second period and never looked back. Immediately after the game, Dawg fans began Googling “uga baseball 2025 any good?”.
Meanwhile Vanderbilt (NR, 14-3, 2-2 SEC) scored a last-second win against South Carolina, 66-63. The ‘Dores were fueled by C #99 Devin McGlockton, who with a minute left in the game blocked a shot, helped force a shot-clock violation, and scored on a put-back with seconds left to give Vandy the win.
Previously on Vols vs. ‘Dores
Tennessee won both of last year’s meetings between the schools, 75-62 in Nashville on Jan. 27, and 88-53 in Knoxville on Feb. 17—giving the Vols nine wins out of the last 10 contests in the series. Tennessee has a commanding 131-76 lead all-time against Vandy, but the story changes when the venue is Memorial AKA America’s Worst Gym, as Tennessee has just a 45-54 when facing the Commodores on the road.
Preview
Bullets
Housekeeping note: data is now being pulled from barttorvik.com rather than sports-reference.com. Torvik makes the data much easier to pull and keeps most of the same numbers I was using before, although Player Efficiency Rating (PER) and Win Shares/40 are replaced by Points Over Replacement (PRPG!) and Defensive Points Over Replacement (DPRG!). Those two numbers let you know how valuable a player is compared to an average replacement player at the same position.
As always, green=the player is ranked highly in that category, red=the player is ranked low. The darker the shade, the higher/lower the player is ranked.
Prediction
It’s hard to call a mid-January road game in Nashville a “must win”, but consider the circumstances. There are nine road games in a SEC basketball season. If you want to go above .500 in conference road play—and only the very best conference teams will pull that off—you’ve got to win the ones you’re a heavy favorite in. You’ve already taken one road loss at Florida. Auburn next weekend is a likely L. Games at Kentucky and A&M will be incredibly difficult. That means getting a win at Vandy is paramount, or else you’re staring a losing conference road record in the face and jeopardizing both your conference and national tournament seeds.
Then you have the confines of that awful “gym” Vandy plays in, where odd and ominous things always seem to happen, and where Tennessee has a terrible record historically, and it begins to feel like an “oh no” game.
The good news is Tennessee is a much better team than Vandy. The Commodores haven’t played a particularly good schedule. There were zero Quad 1 teams on Vandy’s non-conference schedule, and they lost to a Quad 2 team (Drake, 70-81). They do have one Quad 1 win, on the road against LSU to open SEC play. But VU is just 3-3 against Quad 1&2 teams this year, while Tennessee is 6-1. By every metric, UT should win this game. And while there’s always room for “Memorial Magic” or “America’s Worst Gym-nastics” or whatever comes out of that dump, there’s the fact that Tennessee is 8-2 in their last 10 trips to West End. That should be 9-1 after Saturday. Vols 74, Vandy 66.