With just eight available players, is Vanderbilt women's basketball season in jeopardy?

Vanderbilt women's basketball coach Shea Ralph announced Sunday that freshman center Amauri Williams had been dismissed from the team. Along with three season-ending injuries suffered before the Commodores' first game, Vanderbilt is left with just eight available players for the remainder of the season.

In January 2021, Vanderbilt opted out of the remainder of the season altogether due to COVID-19 opt-outs and injuries. At that point, the Commodores were starting down a six-week span with just seven players available, one of whom was limited after returning from a torn ACL suffered the previous season. After the opt-out, then-coach Stephanie White was fired after several players entered the transfer portal.

There have been no indications that this year's Vanderbilt team would shut down the season, and the Commodores currently have more players available than they did at the same point in the 2021 season. But it's also an uncommon situation for a team to be forced to play the entirety of the SEC season with just eight players.

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Similar situations

UConn, where Ralph served as an assistant from 2008-21, is in a similar situation. The Huskies lost star Paige Bueckers to a torn ACL before the start of the season, and they had to postpone a game due to having fewer than seven players. The Big East has a minimum of seven scholarship players that must be available to play.

Vanderbilt hasn't reached that point yet. The Commodores did play one game with seven available, an overtime win over Lipscomb in December. By the time the game went to overtime, just six were available after Yaubryon Chambers fouled out. However, they have had at least seven available to start every game so far.

However, the Huskies' situation is a bit more temporary. Two players, Bueckers and Ice Brady, are out for the season. The others have shorter-term injuries, so UConn could have as many as 10 available players if all are able to return. After one postponement, the Huskies announced their next game will go on as scheduled, indicating they will have at least seven players.

In NCAA women's basketball, a team must have five available players to begin a game, though the team may continue to play with fewer if players are injured or foul out during the game. A team that has only one available player is required to forfeit unless it is deemed that both teams still have a chance to win.

Vanderbilt postponed a game against Texas A&M last season due to COVID-19 protocols. Ralph said then that the team had five players available at that time. The Commodores also had a game against Missouri postponed due to COVID issues with the Tigers; both games were later made up.

Some teams have opted to play with fewer than seven players. The IUPUI men's basketball team had six available players by the end of the 2021-22 season but continued playing, losing all but one game against Division I competition.

In 2021-22, Mississippi State women's basketball had just seven available players for the final eight games of the season. The Bulldogs finished with a 6-10 conference record. They won two games where just seven players played, including one over Vanderbilt in January.

Though the Bulldogs successfully completed their regular season without having to cancel a game, they declined a bid to the WNIT due to lack of available players.

In the Commodores' win over Kentucky last season, the Wildcats had just six players available, one of whom fouled out of the game. That was a temporary situation; Kentucky went through a three-week stretch with seven players available, but that was the only game the Wildcats played with six, and they had nine players available by season's end.

Opting out

The main difference between the ill-fated 2020-21 season and this one was that the specter of the pandemic significantly lingered in 2021. The team had already been shut down twice due to COVID protocols, which were much stricter than they are now. Vanderbilt is at much less risk two years later of being down players due to COVID.

But part of the cautionary tale of that season still lingers. At that time, four players were out with injuries that would cost them all or most of the season, plus Demi Washington's case of myocarditis. While Washington's situation was specific to the pandemic, as were the number of opt-outs that team saw, the injuries were not.

Ralph, for her part, has been adamant that the team can still play with eight players.

"I had some experience as an assistant coach where we won multiple championships, and we played like six kids," Ralph said Sunday. " ... Focusing on, hey, most of the time we only play eight kids anyway, right? In basketball, we just have to be really smart and not shoot ourselves in the foot, get ourselves in trouble with fouls and that kind of thing. And then we can be creative with how we play defensively."

While Vanderbilt mostly played a nine-player rotation last season, the Commodores did have a few games in which they played with fewer than that. Vanderbilt played eight players in four SEC games and seven players in one, though the Commodores played at least nine in each of their four SEC wins.

Even before Williams' dismissal, she had not appeared in a game since early December. Every ensuing game has been played with either seven or eight players available, so barring further injuries the status quo is likely to hold for now.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Can Vanderbilt women's basketball salvage season with just eight players?