I’ll admit: when I saw Vanderbilt’s starting lineup for the season opener against Marquette, I did a double take. What was Bryce Drew thinking, starting Nolan Cressler ahead of Joe Toye?
It turns out, though, that Drew knew what he was doing. We talked about Toye’s early-season struggles before, but Nolan Cressler went from being “oh God what is he doing in the game?” as a junior to a valuable role player as a senior. And that was something exactly none of us saw coming.
But maybe we should have. After transferring from Cornell, where he had been the leasing scorer (albeit on an awful team) as a sophomore, we heard a lot about how good Cressler looked in practice during his redshirt year.