A while back, former Vanderbilt player Matthew Fisher-Davis said on Twitter (and I’m not going to go find the exact tweet) that in the transfer portal era, signing a freshman has ended up being like a one-year tryout for the player.
Noah Shelby came in to Vanderbilt as a four-star recruit. You’d have thought entering the season that he would displace Trey Thomas in Vanderbilt’s backcourt rotation; instead, Shelby played the second-fewest minutes on the team, and that was only because Lee Dort missed a significant portion of the season due to injury. He had a stretch of seven games in the middle of the season where he played 88 minutes total, and posted 12 points and a season-high 15 minutes at Tennessee.