Jerry Stackhouse was always a fiery competitor during his playing days at North Carolina and in his 18-year career in the NBA, and while he’s adopted a calmer demeanor much of the time as Vanderbilt’s head basketball coach, sometimes that fire comes back out on the bench.
Wednesday night was a prime example of that when Stackhouse absolutely lost it on the officials in the second half of Vanderbilt’s game against VCU, when he spent an entire timeout screaming at the referees for giving one of his players a technical for taunting — eventually having to be restrained by multiple assistants and one of the arena police officers and escorted off the floor.
Jerry Stackhouse earned this ejection. My gosh. pic.twitter.com/YboaDJxI4C
— Kyle Boone (@Kyle__Boone) December 1, 2022
There is no question Stackhouse earned his early exit from this one, as he took exception the taunting T and made sure they heard all about his feelings on the matter. It doesn’t take a lip reading expert to make out the many (many) “F- you’s” directed at the refs, and he was not willing to calm down quickly. You don’t often see a coach chasing the refs around the court to keep giving them a piece of his mind, but Stackhouse was quite literally breathing down the neck of one official at one point. We will probably get something about how he was sticking up for his guys but went too far in his postgame comments, as while it’s one thing to be mad about a call, this was a bit much.