Anchor Drop, December 14, 2018: We won’t know how this AD hire works out for a while

Jim Brown-USA TODAY SportsGood morning.

There’s a lot of cautious optimism surrounding new Vanderbilt athletic director Malcolm Turner. Joe Rexrode thinks that Turner can do great things if he’s given the freedom to operate by Nick Zeppos — a big if. Zeppos explained why he went with a nontraditional AD hire.

I think I agree with a lot of the reasoning here. Vanderbilt doesn’t need a functionary right now; it needs a visionary. If Vanderbilt just needed someone to come in and pay the bills for a few years, keep the coaches happy, and do some minor upkeep on facilities, then hiring someone like Turner would be a needless risk. But Vanderbilt needs a lot more than that from its athletic…