Joe Kinsey
Videos by OutKick
Over the last few days, message boards across the SEC had been littered with rumblings of Vanderbilt players opting out of the season finale Saturday at Georgia, but it was typical message board material without concrete evidence of a player revolt. This is the same team that allowed fill-in kicker, Sarah Fuller, to give a halftime speech to her teammates as they were being blown out by Missouri.
Now we have concrete evidence that there’s been some sort of revolt going on inside the Commodore program after all, according to Tennessean reporter Adam Sparks. Sparks was able to get Vandy interim head coach Todd Fitch to go on record saying that he had “talked to a couple of guys” about opting out. Sparks wonders now if Vandy will even have 53 scholarship players making the trip to Athens.
Fitch, who has been put in a horrible position by the school’s athletic department, says he’ll have a roster update “later in the week.” That sounds like the interim coach doesn’t know how many guys will actually get on the plane to go get stomped by the Dawgs.
What’s clear is that one girl — Fuller — will be going to Athens. Sparks reports that Fuller could be joined by Vandy’s 2019 kicker, Ryley Guay, who is in the Vandy medical school and has a year of eligibility remaining. Guay would need approval from the NCAA and to go through COVID testing in order to join the team. As it stands today, Fuller is the team’s kicker.
Kirby Smart was asked if he’ll have a conversation with his team on how to handle Fuller if she’s in harm’s way on a kickoff. Publicly, it doesn’t sound like the Georgia head coach plans to give the kicker any special attention.
“Probably not. I’ve never had to have that conversation before. I’m not going to change and have that conversation now,” Smart said on his virtual press conference. “We don’t account for the kicker in our returns. I don’t think anybody in the country accounts for the kicker. You assume that if you get to the kicker, you did a pretty good job in the return game. We don’t plan on having a conversation about it. She plays a very physical sport, to be honest with you. I’ve seen some pretty brutal collisions without a helmet and without gear on. I’m sure she can take care of herself when it comes to that. That’s not something we’ve really concerned with because we don’t assign anybody to the kicker.”
With a few players considering opting out, does Vandy have 53 scholarship players for Georgia game?
Interim coach Todd Fitch said they are currently above that mark, but they've never been too far above it.
He hopes things "are settling down" now.
— Adam Sparks (@AdamSparks) December 1, 2020
Vandy interim coach Todd Fitch said he "talked to a couple of guys" about players opting out.
Said there would be updates on roster numbers later in week.
— Adam Sparks (@AdamSparks) December 1, 2020
“She plays a very physical sport, to be honest with you. I’ve seen some pretty brutal collisions without a helmet and without gear on. I’m sure she can take care of herself when it comes to that.”
Utter fucking madness. I really hope one of the Georgia players annoints himself the Physics and Biology Professor and lays this girl out, just to put this stupid lunacy to rest.
She’s a GOALIE, FFS. Any collisions she has been involved in don’t begin to compare to getting laid out by a 225 brick sh!thouse running at full speed.
Can you imagine the liberal cries of “SEX-ism!”, “mis-OG-yny!”, and even “SEX-ist bru-TAL-ity!” if some 300 pound behemoth knocked the girl into next week with a hit? No, she’ll kick the ball badly and run off the field… again…
Well Vandy can bring in the rest of the girls soccer team to fill out the roster. They can’t be much worse than what was on the field Saturday. Sure they may get beat 200-0, but they would win the Nobel and ESPY most woke idiots awrds.
Vanderbilt is a joke and doesn’t belong in the SEC in football. Baseball, soccer sure they’re top tier. In football they put no money into the program and will never not be the doormat as long as they maintain that philosophy. Kentucky elevated itself under stoops. They broke their 31 year losing streak against a legit good Florida team. Vandy broke a 20-something year losing streak to Florida too a few years ago…when Florida bottomed out at 4 wins with a completely wiped out roster. I’d rather compete against UCF than continue the farcical yearly matchup against the commode doors.
I feel like we’re watching a bad remake of the movie “Lucas” in real time. Poor girl is going to end up on a gurney headed to the hospital before it dawns on everybody that this was a horrible idea.
There are playing with fire. If this woman is actually involved in kickoff coverage, she will be hurt. Badly hurt. Getting run into by a 120-lb female soccer player is nothing compared to getting hit by a jacked 240-lb male who lives in the weight room.
Vandy can have the best of both worlds here. Get Bruce Jenner enrolled in school, have him take his high heels off, and let him kick the ball. After all, he was the Olympic decathlon champion 40 years ago… I bet he can do better than a 25 yard piddling squib kick…
There are plenty of men who do not belong on a D1 college football field, she is stronger than some of those men. Its just a terrible idea all around to have a person who is not physically strong enough to protect themselves on a college football field, for the same reason she would not enter the octagon or the boxing ring with 200+ pound men.
That was a pretty damn good answer by Kirby Smart, considering how many pitfalls he could have fell into.
If I had been Kirby I would have said:
“Well, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that issue since Vandy won’t be kicking off to us except for one time during the game. And since she’ll (Fuller) will be scooting off the field as fast as she can after kicking the ball, we’ll have 11 on 10 and expect to run the ball back for a touchdown. If one of our players calls for a fair catch, I’ll run him off the team.”