Defense has been a major talking point for Vanderbilt over the offseason, and that chatter continues as it looks ahead to its season opener against Maryland Eastern Shore on Monday night.

Though Mark Byington mentioned after the team’s first practice that they hadn’t worked on defense as much during the Summer, the team has focused on it heavily since returning in September.

Though it’s still far from perfect, the team has taken some strides in that department, according to Byington.

“If you look by our scrimmages I’d say our defense wasn't very good, but if you look at our last week of practice I think we've taken major jumps.” Byington said. "We have guys with ability to guard, we have some really quick guards that could do a good job.”

Gelling on the defensive end will be a critical piece to determining how far this team will go; especially in a tough SEC that is viewed as one of the best conferences in the country. This is something that Byington acknowledged and said needs to happen soon.

“It's gotta be a focus of ours. We can't just try to outscore people and we know that's not the recipe to win on the road. We know it's going to be the recipe to win the SEC. So we better go ahead and start now and understand the value of getting stops.” says Byington.

In a pair of scrimmages, the Commodores gave up 89 and 102 points respectively, winning one and losing the other. Byington talked about some of things that he saw in those two games from his team defensively, and where he's seen that improve.

“We struggled in transition defense in some of these scrimmages and so I think we've taken major jumps in that in the last couple of days.” Byington said. “Some of it we didn't really overemphasize scouting reports with the other teams, so maybe we made some personnel things that weren't quite correct, and we'll be more locked into that with real games and real opponents.”

If the Commodores want to turn heads this season, defense on the other end will be a deciding factor. It may take time, and it may not even be convincing early, but improvement could be imminent and improvement is a process.

We’ll get to see what that progress looks like firsthand on Monday night.