A 70-91 overall record and 28-60 record in conference play doesn't happen only because of bad luck or accident.

Jerry Stackhouse's unceremonious exit from Vanderbilt wasn't the result of something that popped up overnight or one game.

A season like Vanderbilt had in 2023-24 doesn't happen just because of one bad offseason or a couple flukey misevals on the recruiting trail.

That was a factor, though. The simplest correlation is that of Vanderbilt's win-loss record in the last five seasons and its recruiting classes as well as its player retention.

Out of the 19 scholarship high school recruits that Stackhouse signed in his pre-2023 recruiting classes just three of them were on Vanderbilt's roster at the end of 2023-24. Those three players were Tyrin Lawrence, Paul Lewis and Colin Smith.

11 of those 19 players transferred. Four of the six transfers that came to Vanderbilt with multiple years of eligibility before 2023-24 also went back into the portal.

That wasn't a coincidence. Some of those players were nudged out, some left on their own accord.

Reflect on what that says about Vanderbilt's track record of talent evaluation and also its culture under Stackhouse. Not great things.

When a season as is bad as 2023-24 was for Vanderbilt it's clear that there's more wrong than it just being a down year. A season like that shows you that there's something fundamentally wrong with the operation being ran.

Stackhouse may have been joking when he referred to his program as a "benevolent dictatorship" after Vanderbilt's 57-point loss to Alabama, but to a lot of people inside his program that didn't feel like a joke.

It felt like reality without much benevolence.

Not everyone in the program took well to that reality. It felt as if Memorial Gym was often tense. In the film room, on the practice floor and elsewhere. It felt like it wasn't at all uncommon that Stackhouse and a player weren't seeing eye to eye. Whether that information was making it into the press conferences and public eye or not.

That wasn't limited to bench players that felt slighted in their playing time or guys who weren't playing well. It was also foundational players of Stackhouse's program, ones you would never have guessed and people on Stackhouse's staff.

At times, it even felt like that in Vanderbilt's brightest moments.

That late-season run in 2022-23 felt magical and like perhaps some of the best basketball that Vanderbilt fans have seen in recent memory, though.

It wasn’t just good basketball. It was electric. The way Vanderbilt beat the odds, the Stackhouse one-liners, the feel inside Memorial Gym. All of it.

Vanderbilt beat Kentucky for the first time of Stackhouse’s tenure. Twice. In a week. Tennessee too.

That team had magic.

But ultimately that magic didn't result in an NCAA Tournament berth. It didn't feel fully sustainable, either.

It wasn't going to be unless Vanderbilt did something that never happened under Stackhouse; taking care of business in non-conference play.

Stackhouse was far from the worst coach to roam the sidelines at Vanderbilt. The former NBA star had a few pros play under his watch and took his team to two NIT’s in five seasons.

Perhaps those NIT’s could’ve been NCAA Tournaments had Vanderbilt hit the ground running early.

After dropping 16 non-conference games to non-power five opponents in Stackhouse's first four seasons, he knew something had to give in year five. The Vanderbilt head coach changed his scheduling philosophy and his mentality.

“We’ve still got competitive teams but it’s teams that we can get away from," Stackhouse said. "Do it like everybody else do. When in Rome, do what the Romans do. We’re gonna try to beat the hell out of everybody.”

That didn't happen. In fact, Vanderbilt's season felt over before the new year rang in.

Why Stackhouse's teams didn't get anything rolling until it was often too late will always be a question that defines his tenure.

Perhaps it was a byproduct of Vanderbilt's offense of around 250 set plays having too difficult of a learning curve, maybe something about preseason workouts had something to do with it, maybe it was the staff not attacking those games with enough of a sense of urgency.

Whatever the case may be. That issue feels like a microcosm of the Stackhouse era. The things that hampered it at the beginning continued to do so for the remainder of the tenure.

Rather than evolving, Vanderbilt continued to drop early non-conference games, it continued to fail to retain rosters as well as coaching staffs and continued misevaluations with recruits. The same stories continued to leak out about the program's culture and players' relationships with their head coach.

Perhaps that can be ok for awhile, but patience runs thin when you have the relationship that Stackhouse did with the fanbase.

Stackhouse has a funny, witty side to him that fans didn't see or open up to as often as they could've. Whether it was fair or not, there were times when the fanbase thought of the former Vanderbilt coach as egotistical and as someone who always had an excuse. The coach's comments about an irrational and divisive 5.8% of the fanbase didn't do much to help his case.

Neither did his back and fourth with fans, public calling out of then-freshman Myles Stute, insinuation that he can be the bigger a-hole and referral to another SEC team as "the best team money can buy."

The now former Vanderbilt coach isn't evil, though. Or anything close to it. There's a side that Vanderbilt fans saw of him the night before his firing that they didn't get to see as much as they should have.

Stackhouse seems to generally want the best for people and is someone who's likely done a tremendous amount of good for people through the platform that he's had. There's a reason that he'll likely land on his feet with an NBA assistant job if he wants it.

Stackhouse is generally said to have been by the book. There hasn't really been a history of tampering or cheating. The former NBA star wanted to get things done the right way.

That didn't happen, though. Not enough, at least.

Instead, Stackhouse will go down in the same tune as most of the other former NBA stars who tried to come down to the college level and turn a program around.

Someone who didn’t win enough, someone who didn’t have enough positive culture in his program, someone who didn’t recruit enough.

There's been red flags since day one. It's not necessarily a surprise that this didn't work out. With Stackhouse's basketball acumen and track record that's a shame, though.

As Vanderbilt moves on from Stackhouse, his tenure will be looked back on with thoughts of what could've been. Stackhouse had one of the highest ceilings of any coach to take the home sideline at Memorial Gymnasium. That ceiling wasn't hit, though.

As a result, Vanderbilt is still searching for its first NCAA Tournament berth since 2016-2017 and will be left with memories of a magic that didn't last.