Column: Not Again, Vanderbilt Football

NASHVILLE—This has to look different for Vanderbilt football. 

It just has to. There’s no other option if this program is going to go where it wants to go. College Football Playoff teams don’t lose games like this. AP Top 25 teams don’t lose games like this, at least ones that stay there don’t. 

Yet, Vanderbilt did this time a year ago. 

That night was among the worst of Clark Lea’s head coaching tenure. It started with rain, wind and starting quarterback Diego Pavia limping around the field pregame. By the end of it, Vanderbilt was walking into the tunnel stunned after a 36-32 loss to a team that it had no business losing to. It did, though. 

The Vanderbilt team that thought it had turned the corner appeared to be the same old Vanderbilt again. It gave up a go-ahead touchdown in the final moments of the game. It was outrushed 157-110. Lea’s team that had talked so excessively about winning in the margins was hurt by 20 more penalty-induced yards than Georgia State and easily gave up points after a mental mistake on the kickoff. 

It was the antithesis of everything the plan that Lea had designed to build a winner at Vanderbilt. It was also a jarring indication of the makeup of the team that he’d built. They were good enough to beat anyone, but it was also not talented enough to show up to a game against an inferior team unprepared and expect to win. 

Maybe Alabama could’ve done it. Maybe Georgia or Texas would’ve escaped, but not Vanderbilt that night. 

“I was disappointed because we were a better team than that,” Vanderbilt three-way standout Martel Hight said on Tuesday. “We came out lackadaisical and we kind of just had in our mind that we were going to win that game already and that’s where we failed last year.” 

The story has been exhausted at this point, but it’s noteworthy enough to speak of again until Vanderbilt rights its wrong from this time last year. What happened that Saturday in the old Turner Field was merely a byproduct of what happened in the days prior to it at Vanderbilt’s practice facility. 

Guys were late for meetings. They weren’t focused at practice. They were screwing around when Lea needed them to be locked in. That group thought that it was good enough to win like that. 

“That carried over to the game,” Lea said before ultimately admitting that his team “wasn’t ready” to win its mid-September matchup with Georgia State a year ago. “We played an undisciplined game.” 

Due to a contract signed years ago–perhaps regrettably–by people who no longer have power over Vanderbilt and Georgia State’s programs, Lea’s team doesn’t have to be defined by that mishap in Atlanta. It can conceivably leave all of that in its past if it does what it’s supposed to as a 28.5-point favorite on Saturday. 

Only if it handled what it needed to from Monday to Friday, though. 

Nobody late to meetings. Good, spirited practices. The appropriate intensity for an opponent that took its figurative lunch money on the road last season. If it’s got that, it’s got a chance to empty the stands by the second half of Saturday’s game. So far, so good on that pursuit. 

“This year we’re more intentional,” Fontenette said. “No guys on lists, everybody showing up to where they’re supposed to be and doing what they’re supposed to do. Last year, it wasn’t that and you know how it happened. This year we need to tighten up on all that.” 

If Vanderbilt has truly done that, it shouldn’t have any problems on Saturday. This isn’t a matter of talent or physicality, Lea has equipped this group with everything it needs in those regards. His team is good enough to come out and beat Dell McGee’s by multiple touchdowns, it’s good enough to do that to a few SEC teams. 

It’s got to want to win baldy on Saturday, though. It’s got to use last season’s result as “motivation,” like Fontenette said it would. It’s got to remember the sour taste that it had in its mouth this time a year ago and how its season was altered as it walked into the abnormally wide and open tunnel in the old right field of Turner Field. 

It’s got to be insistent that something like that isn’t going to happen to it again. Maybe then it can finally get the result that has avoided it in this series. Maybe then it will demonstrate that it's got the needed maturity as a program to do all the things that it's set out to do.

“This year we’ll use it as motivation,” Fontenette said, “And go in swinging and we’ll come out on top.”