NASHVILLE — Two years ago, I sat in the office of Vanderbilt coach Derek Mason and, to be blunt, I saw a man with a lot of questions and not many answers.
In 2014, there were people who had trumpeted his arrival from Stanford, where he was a successful defensive coordinator. But after Mason’s first season at Vanderbilt, which saw the Commodores go 0-8 in the SEC, some of those same people were telling me Mason was in over his head.
“The problem,” Mason said as we talked last Thursday during Vanderbilt’s Pro Day, “is that when you’re a first-year head coach, you don’t know what you don’t know.