WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Every day, Vanderbilt coach Mark Byington puts a quote at the bottom of the Commodores’ daily practice plan. Then, before practice begins, he calls on a player at random to recite the quote back to him.
But there’s one saying Byington tells his team so often, it doesn’t need writing down.
There’s two types of people in the world: You’re either humble… or about to be humbled.
It would be all too easy for the Commodores — maybe the surprise of this college basketball season, now 12-0 after Sunday’s 98-67 blowout over Wake Forest — to fall in the latter camp. Yet despite being ranked 11th in the nation, their highest rating since 1992-93, and enduring as one of Division-I’s last six undefeated teams, Byington’s squad has run the table so far in nonconference without letting complacency set in.
“The fact that we’ve had success,” Byington tells The Athletic, “and we know we’re getting other teams’ best shots and they’re ready for us, that helps refocus us.”
Vanderbilt’s 12-0 start is the program’s best since 2007-08, but more impressively, Byington’s team has already won as many games before Christmas as the Commodores totaled in five of the seven seasons before he arrived in Nashville for the 2024-25 season.
It’s not like Vanderbilt is beating up on creampuff teams, either, even if it’s yet to face a Top 25 team; half its wins have come against top-100 opponents, with only one of those at home. In the process, the Commodores have become computer darlings, ranking eighth on KenPom, which sandwiches them in the stratosphere between UConn and Houston. Moreover, they’re now favored over Florida, the defending national champions, to win the SEC, arguably the deepest conference in America.
Not bad for a team picked to finish 11th in the league in the preseason.
“We definitely remember that,” sophomore guard Tyler Tanner says with a grin. “That’s just a little fuel to the fire.”
But at this point, anyone labeling Vanderbilt a plucky upstart or a simple feel-good story is missing the point entirely. The Commodores — boosted by their top-10 offense, easily one of the most aesthetically-pleasing in the country — are legitimate threats to win the SEC for the first time in over three decades, and to make serious noise in the NCAA Tournament beyond.
And any comeuppance they deal out in the process? Well, that’s just gravy.
So, how did Byington build something so special from nothing, especially in such short order? And, notably, without any five-star recruits or any of The Athletic’s top-100 transfers?
“Our guys are happy for each other’s success,” Byington says. “I know a lot of teams are battling the opposite of that.”
At the start of shootaround the night before the Wake Forest game, Byington tells his team — for maybe the only time all season — that it doesn’t need to go full speed, especially during defensive walkthroughs. His focus instead?
“I want our minds to be working,” he calls out, before the Commodores dive into a pop quiz-like run-through of their various ball screen coverages.
Unlike some of the nation’s other top teams, such as Michigan and Arizona, Vanderbilt doesn’t physically overwhelm its opponents with athleticism or length. The Commodores don’t have a single former top-50 recruit on the roster, and have one rotation player — former North Carolina forward Jalen Washington — taller than 6 feet 8.
What distinguishes Byington’s squad, though, is how it thinks the game.
Because fueling all that flashy, fast-paced offense is a team-wide mindset predicated on something rare in college basketball: unselfishness.
“We have so many guys that could be top options and top scorers, but we just do whatever on that given night to win,” says senior wing Tyler Nickel. “It’s just us knowing that, and our entire team being OK with that. We all have egos and pride as far as wanting to win and wanting to be our best selves, but not to the detriment of the team.”
Getting a bunch of 20-somethings to buy into that mindset, though, is easier said than done — which is why Byington put such an emphasis this offseason on recruiting players with an established history of unselfishness. As much as on-court fit or basketball skill, Byington wanted guys who would always make the right decision, even if it meant at times passing up individual glory or stats.
That was a focus of Byington’s initial summer, too, when he took over at Vanderbilt after leading James Madison to a program-best 32 wins. But inheriting a blank roster meant he couldn’t be quite as picky in the portal.
“I was so rushed in putting the roster together, I knew I was going to make mistakes and I gave myself forgiveness for making mistakes,” Byington says. “This year, I’m more precise about, ‘This person fits our style, this person fits Vanderbilt and our team and the returners.’ And not to say I’m sitting here like, hey, I got it exactly right, but it was (a) major step in the right direction.”
That much becomes clear during a single 45-minute shootaround. The Commodores — who average 19.6 assists per game, 16th most in the country — move like they’re connected by a giant rubber band, never spreading so far apart that a ballhandler doesn’t have multiple passing options. This fluidity is driven by the team’s three lead guards: Tanner, Oklahoma transfer Duke Miles and TCU transfer Frankie Collins (who missed the Wake Forest game due to a lower-body injury). All three average over 4.5 assists per game, making Vanderbilt the only high-major team in America with three players reaching that mark.
Even without Collins on Sunday, Vanderbilt had 23 assists on 35 makes, 16 of them from Tanner and Miles.
Duke Miles is Vanderbilt’s leading scorer this season and one of three players averaging over 15 points per game. (Wesley Hale / Imagn Images)
Not only does that pass-first approach inherently stress defenses, which have to keep track of all the moving Commodores at once, but also it limits turnovers that stem from isolation drives, overdribbling and, worst of all, hero ball.
No wonder the Commodores are top-30 nationally in offensive turnover rate, with 10 or fewer giveaways in over half their games. “Coach lets us play through mistakes a lot — as long as your mind is in the right spot,” Tanner says. “If it’s a selfish way, it’ll be different than if it’s like, oh, you just didn’t see (someone open).”
The result is an offense where, on any given night, a different Commodore can go off. Against Wake Forest, it’s Nickel, who drops 26 points while tying his career-high with eight made 3s.
“It’s the most fun,” Nickel says, smirking, “that I’ve had in college basketball.”
One of Byington’s biggest basketball inspirations is the old Mike D’Antoni-led “Seven Seconds or Less” Phoenix Suns, who revolutionized the NBA by playing to their namesake: trying to get a shot in the first seven seconds of the shot clock.
“I thought that could fit something I could do,” Byington says.
Byington’s team isn’t quite as fast as D’Antoni’s Suns were, but Vanderbilt is not far off. The Commodores have a top-50 tempo nationally, with an average possession length of just 15.5 seconds. Wake Forest finds out the hard way what that looks like up close, as Nickel bangs a movement 3 just 14 seconds into the game, setting the tone for the Commodores’ onslaught. Against the Demon Deacons, Vanderbilt scores 19 fast-break points and 24 off turnovers, validating why it averages the fourth-most transition points among high-major teams, according to Synergy.
“They exposed us,” says Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes. “We were always behind the play in transition.”
That potency in transition is largely because of Tanner and Miles, arguably Byington’s two most important players.
Start with Tanner, who hails from nearby Brentwood, Tenn., some 15 minutes south of Nashville proper. Tanner — a zero-star recruit, who didn’t even have a 247Sports recruiting profile heading into college — committed to Vanderbilt during Jerry Stackhouse’s last season as head coach, in 2023-24. Even after Stackhouse was fired, though, Tanner wanted to honor his commitment … so long as Vandy’s incoming coach still wanted him. “It was a school that I committed to,” Tanner adds, “as well as a staff.”
Wisely, the now 49-year-old Byington made Tanner one of his first calls after landing the first high-major gig of his career. And while Tanner didn’t start a single game last season, he was integral to Vanderbilt’s success as its first guard off the bench — and one who, for the first 15 games of his college career, didn’t commit a single turnover despite playing over 20 minutes nightly.
This season, Tanner’s taken the leap and become one of the most efficient players in America. He’s one of just 10 high-major players averaging at least 15 points and 4.5 assists per game while shooting over 40 percent from 3. The other nine are all future lottery picks — including Houston’s Kingston Flemings and Arkansas’ Darius Acuff Jr. — or All-Americans, such as Iowa State’s Joshua Jefferson and Alabama’s Labaron Philon.
Tyler Tanner was an unheralded recruit coming out of high school and is now one of the most efficient players in the country. (Chris Day / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)
Miles, on the other hand, took the circuitous route to Nashville, going from Troy to High Point to Oklahoma before landing with the Commodores this summer. One of Byington’s assistants, Kenneth Mangrum, previously coached Miles at Troy and always believed he had the talent to be a productive high-major starter. After being the Panthers’ leading scorer, Miles was mostly just a 3-and-D guy at Oklahoma last season — especially playing next to eventual lottery pick Jeremiah Fears — but his analytics made Byington and Mangrum believe there was more meat on the bone, so to speak.
“The character stuff we knew,” Byington says. “We’re like, all right, this is what it’s like in the SEC — but he’s playing with a lottery pick. Can it look more like the High Point version, but at the highest level? And we just thought it could.”
Miles leads the Commodores in scoring at 17.1 points per game, and is ninth in KenPom’s player of the year rankings — just ahead of Texas Tech forward JT Toppin, one of three returning All-Americans from last season.
Not bad for two unheralded recruits, who suddenly look like the SEC’s best backcourt.
While Tanner is perfecting his backward, through-the-legs bounce passes at the end of shootaround, Byington offers up another quote. This one, he got from his college coach at UNC-Wilmington, Jerry Wainwright:
Fat cats don’t fight.
“We’re not going to be fat cats,” Byington says. “We better be ready to play, because the team we’re playing is going to play well.”
For as good as Vandy has been, Byington knows bumps are ahead. The Commodores’ second SEC game, after all, is against No. 14 Alabama, which has its own fast-paced offense, one of the closest things to Vanderbilt’s in all of college basketball.
Plus, there are plenty of areas where Byington knows his team can get better. Defensively, the Commodores are top-15 in adjusted efficiency, per KenPom, but still foul at an alarmingly high rate, which could cost them against better teams. And though the Wake Forest game serves as a strong bounce back from a sloppy overtime win at Memphis, Byington hopes his Commodores are in more games that get “junked up” to test how they perform in suboptimal conditions.
That doesn’t mean he’s not enjoying the ride. Just that he knows there’s plenty more of it ahead.
“I always tell them we’re going to be good, and I haven’t told them at all that we are good,” Byington says. “At the same time, I know that they already know some confidence that, when we play the right way, we do the right thing, that we can beat anybody.”
