What Vanderbilt coach Jerry Stackhouse said after the 88-53 loss at No. 9 Tennessee

Everything Vanderbilt coach Jerry Stackhouse said after the 88-53 loss to No. 9 Tennessee Saturday night at Thompson-Boling Arena:

If this Tennessee team is as good as any he’s seen during the Rick Barnes era

“Yeah, I think so, man. I think he said that. I mean, he said toward the end man, they played as well as they played all year. (Zakai) Zeigler, obviously. (Dalton) Knecht, we came in the game figuring that we had to try to to manage him. And other guys exploded. Zeigler, (Santiago) Vescovi, and (Josiah-Jordan) James go 11 for, 15 from three. You’re not going have much of a chance with that, tonight especially, with us not making shots. I thought we had some goods looks early in the game that (if) they go down, I think it puts a little bit more pressure, but they were able to get away from us early and we never ready able to recover.”

If that’s the kind of Tennessee team that can make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament

“I think so. I think with them, they got all the pieces and they can get it done. But it’s not like they haven’t gone on the road and hadn’t shown (it there) as well. So you don’t get to play in here in the NCAA Tournament, but they did show what they’re capable of. But I just, their game, when the game got away from us, it’s like, we got no help. I think there was a lot of bumps and stuff that I think could’ve maybe bounced it out, but it all just kind of happened like it did.”

If he thought Tennessee’s physicality was too much for Vanderbilt

“No, I thought the rebounding game, when you look at it, it was pretty even. We always kind of judged that from rebounding. I just thought that we didn’t crash the way that we needed to as the game was (going on). The transition game points, they were able to get in on the fast break, in the long end. Their threes, wasn’t like they were running for twos, they were running for threes and getting threes in transition and it was just a lack of not enough guys on the board. I think we’re really going to be disappointed when we look at the film and see (it). We’ve made a big emphasis trying to be three guys on the board and a lot of times I look down, there was just one. So I think that that helps take their thrust away when those guys got to box you out. They don’t have to box you out and are able to just get on the break and they took advantage of that.”

Vanderbilt’s biggest margin of defeat this season, what that means for this team at this point

“Like I said, (Tennessee has) done this. Some other teams, we hadn’t had too many nights like this when we’ve been off, everybody was off. This is the worst that they’ve been collectively, so we just got to take it as a bad game, not a (good) night. So that’s why I didn’t finish with the (starters), I kind of called it an early night tonight because we just didn’t have it. I thought the ball was sticking a lot there early on, opportunities where we could have got off of it early and made the next play. We just didn’t do that tonight. So it was just one of those nights where we didn’t have it.”

Playing Tennessee tough in the past and if that kind of loss is more frustrating in a rivalry game 

“Yeah, it’s (a big game) for us. It’s just, like, our vision board is just trying to get better. We’re not on the level of Tennessee right now. Again, it’s great that we had a (closer) game at home. We had some in our building where we can compete against them. But right now they, I think they’re clicking as well as anybody in the country. So we, we can’t take a lot of frustration from that and frustration that we didn’t play well. Some of the things in the game plan that we wanted to do, we didn’t do. That was frustrating. So we’ll look back at that and just try to figure out how we can get better at that going forward. But as far as for game-to-game, we like to think that we won two out of our last three and up until tonight, we’ve been doing some things really well, kind of trending in a good direction. But tonight was definitely a setback and that’s why you go back to practice to try to get better for it for the next game.”

What his emphasis will be at practice in the coming days 

“We’ll figure that out.”