Despite the record, Vanderbilt basketball looks to have a keeper in Jerry Stackhouse | Estes

Surprised? No doubt.

We probably shouldn’t have been, though.

Vanderbilt, after all, scared Kentucky a couple of weeks ago in Lexington. But just to glimpse the scoreboard late in the first half of Tuesday night’s rematch at Memorial Gym — it said the Commodores were 14 points better than the nation’s No. 12 team — made you rub your eyes.

It couldn’t have been real.

In the end, it wasn’t.

Similar to the earlier meeting at Rupp Arena, the Wildcats did enough in the second half to overcome and eventually overwhelm an opponent that it should. Kentucky’s 78-64 victory completed the season sweep and dealt Vanderbilt its 10th SEC defeat in 11 tries.

OK, that’s bad, the record. It's so bad that you'd expect the Commodores, by now, to be sunk for 2019-20. Only they’re not. 

Vanderbilt isn’t playing like a 9-15 team, having beaten one of the league’s best in LSU last week and twice going toe-to-toe with another of the league’s top teams in Kentucky.

Despite key injuries and loss of its best player in Aaron Nesmith, Vanderbilt is a lot better now than it was a month ago.

And that improvement is a credit to Jerry Stackhouse.

Even in losing, Vanderbilt is hinting strongly that it has an awfully good first-year coach roaming the sidelines at Memorial Gym. It’s not easy to continue to get the best out of college students when the results haven’t been there and the games arrive quickly, with disappointment stacking up for the second year in a row.

Last season, it proved too much. That Vanderbilt team probably had more talent, too. But it didn’t improve like this one. It didn't play like this one.

Ask Kentucky.

“I wouldn’t want to be playing Vandy anymore,” UK coach John Calipari said. “I mean, they’re playing. It’s obvious (Stackhouse) has a great connection with them, because they’re fighting for him. There’s nothing other than, ‘Tell us what to do.’ He’s doing a heck of a job.”

Calipari praised the tactics Stackhouse is using, and he’s not the first opposing SEC coach to say that this season.

When shots are falling, the Commodores have the look of a team that can beat anyone. You get the sense that no one would be eager to face them in next month's SEC Tournament down the street at Bridgestone Arena.

Stackhouse — once a tough, hard-nosed NBA player and now a tough, hard-nosed coach — isn’t one to find cheer in moral victories, much less a debut season that went off the postseason path long ago.

But even he admitted his Commodores are improving and still fighting.

“It gets a little stale. You’d like to get some wins,” Stackhouse said Tuesday night. “And I think we will.  … As our talent pool increases, then a little bit of the separation from those (top) teams will change. I think it comes down to our execution, our X's and O's and our schemes, which I’d put up against any of these teams that we play.”

There is still recruiting, of course, a beastly, yet necessary, chore for any college basketball coach, even those who love doing it. It’s unclear if Stackhouse does. Recruiting remains a question mark.

But in terms of what we’re seeing on the court from Vanderbilt — the sophistication of the schemes, how hard his players continue to go despite lacking much hope for March — it looks like the Commodores have a keeper in Stackhouse.

So now they’d do well to make sure they keep him.

It’s no secret that Stackhouse probably wouldn’t be in Nashville had former athletics director Malcolm Turner not lured him here. Now with Turner no longer at Vanderbilt, though Stackhouse hasn’t indicated personal dissatisfaction in the slightest, it can’t help but make you wonder. Stackhouse has ties to pro ball and wouldn’t have to recruit there or rebuild a program in the SEC.

Yet maybe he's intrigued by this as everyone else is starting to be. No matter what the record says, he appears to be building a culture with a young Vanderbilt team that will return a lot of pieces next season.

It’d be a shame, really, to not get to see where Stackhouse takes this.

Reach Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on Twitter @Gentry_Estes.