Jerry Stackhouse’s coaching tenure at Vanderbilt has not gone particularly well, and he seemed to hit a boiling point on Saturday.
The Commodores lost at home to Arkansas 92-71, dropping to 4-7 on the season. After the game, Stackhouse went on an epic and profanity-laced rant about his team, holding nothing back, via Simon Gibbs of the Vanderbilt Hustler:
“We’ve got to find some guys that want to play basketball. Right now, we’ve got some guys that don’t want to play no damn basketball. We’ve got to figure that out sooner rather than later. I’d rather go with just young guys … give them a chance, when we’ve got guys who have been here four or five years and play 20 minutes and get one offensive rebound and one defensive rebound.”
Stackhouse wasn’t done, calling out the team’s effort and attitude, even citing freshman Myles Stute by name:
“Yeah, I just think it’s a focus thing. You hate to point to one thing, one guy, but it’s just — today, it was literally Myles Stute. I couldn’t even keep him in the game. ...
We’re just doing dumb stuff over and over and over again. And I take responsibility for it, but I don’t know — I haven’t had any teams that I’ve had before that I continue to tell the same things as much as I’ve told this team, for them to still come out and do the same s–t. I was listening to (John) Calipari the other day, listening to the postgame on him. And I think we might have the same team, just with different names. It’s the same thing. Stuff that we work on in practice and we do well, then we don’t come out and we don’t have the carry over that we need to give ourselves the chance to win games.”
Stackhouse’s frustration is understandable, but he’s not going to gain anything by publicly trashing freshmen, especially ones who aren’t used to playing a big role. He’s also not going to win any sympathy comparing himself to Calipari, who at least has a long track record of success. Calipari will also trash himself readily, while Stackhouse is mostly pointing the finger at his players.
Either way, this is one of the more memorable postgame rants we’ve seen recently. At the rate Stackhouse is going, he might not get many more chances to improve on it.
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