This is how Mark Byington built Vanderbilt into a contender
One of the more entertaining parts of the early portion of the college basketball season is to pull up KenPom in the morning and take a look at what significant results did to impact the rankings.
Generally speaking, as you peruse through the top ten, you see a lot of familiar faces. Purdue and UConn and Houston are stalwarts in this day and age. Michigan and Michigan State have stormed through the early part of the season, as has Arizona and Iowa State. Gonzaga is always a metrics darling, and Duke is Duke.
But tucked in amongst that group as the highest rated team in the SEC is none other than Vanderbilt.
A program that has spent much of the post-Kevin Stallings era on the fringes of mediocrity has put together one of the nation’s most potent offensive attacks and, in turn, thrust themselves into the national spotlight.
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Mark Byington is quickly becoming one of my favorite college coaches. He runs one a system that is reliant on ball-screens — 34 percent of their offensive possessions involve a ball-screen in the final action, according to Synergy, and the ‘Dores are scoring 1.173 points-per-possession out of those ball-screens. That’s good for the 99th percentile nationally.
Byington is a master at creating different looks out of basic actions, using multiple variations of weak-side movements to manipulate defenses and confuse individual defenders. The “tagger” is a term that is used when discussing how to defend ball-screens. The “tagger”, who is often referred to a the “low man”, is the weak-side defender whose job it is to play in front of the rim to take away a pass to a rolling big man out of a ball-screen. Byington’s offense, and the options and counters they use out of similar ball-screen actions, puts the tagger in a blender over and over again:
But the key to being able to have success running an offense like this is having guards that understand what you are trying to do, that make the right decision over and over and over again. And it’s Byington’s guards that deserve the majority of the credit for the start this program has had.
“The more handlers you have makes things easier,” Byington said. “And the more guys that can make threes, the better. But the key is to be able to put the ball in the hands of a guy that can score and make plays for others, and we have three.”
Duke Miles is the guy that is getting the most attention right now. A sixth-year senior, Miles has made the rounds in his basketball career. From Troy to High Point to Oklahoma, Vanderbilt was actually the third program that he committed to in the spring. He initially pledged to Virginia before decommitting and announcing his intention to enroll at Texas A&M. Once that fell through, Miles committed to Vanderbilt, and it could not be going better.
“He was the final piece for our team,” Byington said. “We were trying to find another combo-guard and we had some analytics that said he could be better for us. We looked at his High Point film, and one of our assistants was with him at Troy, so once he left Texas A&M, we knew we had to get him.”
Miles is off to an unbelievable start, averaging 17.6 points and 4.4 assists while shooting 42.9 percent from three. He’s been playing at an All-American level, and he may not even be the best guard on Vanderbilt’s roster.
That title goes to Tyler Tanner, a 6-0 sophomore from Brentwood Academy that has been arguably the most improved player in the sport. He’s averaging 16.2 points and 4.3 assists while shooting 57 percent from the floor and 50 percent from three with a 3:1 assist-to-turnover ratio.
“A lot of it is confidence,” Tanner said of his growth after scoring 26 points and handing out six assists in an 88-69 win over previously undefeated SMU in the ACC-SEC Challenge on Wednesday night. “I’ve always had it in me, but I have a lot of freedom from coach. He trusts in me now, and he’s more reliant on me to lead this team.”
And then there is Frankie Collins, a fifth-year senior that leads the program in assists and is “the best on-ball defender” Byington has coached.
He comes off the bench, and doesn’t complain about it.
“The hardest thing to do right now is to get guys that come together and play for one another and play to win,” Byington said. “We found a good combo of talented guys that are also unselfish.”
“I love the fact that I’ll walk into my coaches huddle during timeouts and I’ll hear Tyler Nickel telling the team, ‘let’s do our thing, play the right way.’ They’re echoing the things I’m about to say to them. When it’s player led like that, it means way more than if it comes from me.”
“They believe.”
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Miles, Tanner and Collins are the reason Vanderbilt basketball is the second-best offense in the country.
The stat that proves it, to me, is that the ‘Dores lead the nation in offensive block rate, are second in offensive steal rate and rank fifth in offensive turnover rate, meaning that there isn’t a team in the country that allows fewer defensive plays to be made against them. That only happens when your guards understand their roles, understand the offense they are running and are capable of making the correct reads out of it.
But that’s only the start of it.
“Culturally, it’s a great time to be here at Vanderbilt,” Tanner said. He was talking about the growth of the athletic department generally and the success that football and men’s basketball is having, specifically, but he might as well be talking about the group within the Vanderbilt locker room as well. The ‘Dores lost four of their top six scorers from a season ago, three of whom entered the portal, but there’s an argument to be made about addition by subtraction.
Jason Edwards and MJ Collins were shoot-first guards that were the exact opposite of what Tanner and Miles bring to the table. Jaylen Carey and AJ Hoggard were transfers that Byington brought in that produced but did so inefficiently.
Byington replaced them with portal targets that popped in the metrics as much as they did on tape.
And while it was a risk, it’s paid off, not just in wins, but in the culture that’s been developed inside the program.
“Our trust in each other makes it easy to believe in the team when you believe in every one of your teammates,” Tanner said. “The coaching staff did a great job recruiting this offseason. The whole team is together, and that makes it a lot easier to be confident in the team when it’s like that.”
Tanner is the returnee. As a freshman last season, he led the team in minutes played in games that were eight points or less in the final four minutes. When it came to nut-cutting time, Byington knew who he trusted. The first priority of his offseason was locking in Tanner’s return.
“I told him when the season ended, I’m going to put more on you and lean on you,” Byington said, adding that the hardest part for him was pushing Tanner to be willing to make mistakes. Tanner didn’t commit his first turnover as a freshman until January 11th. Heading into a game on February 19th, Tanner only had four turnovers. “I want him to make some mistakes because I want him to be aggressive and make plays.”
Vanderbilt basketball got off to a great start last year as well, winning 13 of their first 14 games, and while they came back to earth a bit during the heart of SEC play, they still made the tournament. This group hasn’t exactly played a murderer’s row yet, but beating UCF at UCF, VCU, St. Mary’s and SMU all by double digits is not something to ignore.
“If you watch our guys on our team right now, they’re sharing the ball and playing the right way,” Byington said, “but they’re happy for each other’s successes.”
And that, more than anything else, matters most.
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