Column: Vanderbilt Football Still Has Everything in Front of it After Top-Tier Win of Clark Lea's Tenure

“This is a new era of Vandy,” Vanderbilt center Jordan White said while holding the game ball that was awarded to Vanderbilt’s offensive line. “So, this is what you’re gonna expect.”

Clark Lea has had his fair share of signature wins as Vanderbilt’s head coach–and his win over No. 1 Alabama will be his best one until he tops it in a meaningful postseason game–but this one has a place in his five-year tenure that others with similar significance don’t. 

This appears to be the first time his group has demoralized a power-five school as if it were an FCS school. It’s the one that was the most dominant statistically. Perhaps most notably, it wasn’t one that was stunning or involved tears from Lea in the postgame press conference. Instead the Vanderbilt head coach squeezed through a group of chairs in the undersized media room in the basement of Lane Stadium and cracked a joke about penalties and the confined quarters that the press conference was being held in. 

It was stunningly normal and par for the course for this group to go into a place that has historically been as imposing of an environment as there is in college football and do what it did on Saturday. 

“We have to play the game the right way, and so we were good enough tonight to hang in there,” Lea said as if his group had just held off against a group of five opponent in a game that everyone expected it to win. 

Perhaps the most encouraging story of that night for Vanderbilt football was its ability to overcome a few poor performances in the margins. That statement could insinuate that it didn’t play well or deserve to win, though. Make no mistake, this group earned this. 

They were dominant in stretches. Dominant enough to look like they could beat anyone. Not dominant enough to board the flight out of Virginia thinking that it was good enough, though. 

“That was an ugly game, and we're not going to be able to get away with playing like that moving forward,” Lea said on Saturday night. “Obviously our challenge and really, what excites me is that we have so much better football ahead of us, and if we can clean up the things that we have control over, then we're going to have a chance to continue to celebrate.”

Vanderbilt left Blacksburg with the national buzz unlike it’s ever had at this stage of a season under Lea. It has its first statement and sign that it could do something special the rest of the way. Just like its seemingly spotless locker room at the end of the night in week two, Vanderbilt enters week three with a clean slate, though. 

It’s all about South Carolina now as Vanderbilt goes through its day-by-day prep. It’s about what it hopes is its next act. The bad news for this Vanderbilt team is that what happened on Saturday doesn't directly correlate with its results the rest of the way. The good news is that Vanderbilt’s need for a quick reset is the worst news surrounding its program. 

As a result of what it did Saturday, this Vanderbilt team still has all of its aspirations available to it. The College Football Playoff is still in play. So are its chances to do all the things that this program has never done. This Vanderbilt team isn’t perfect–and didn’t play like it on Saturday–but on a night in which a Vanderbilt parent wondered out loud what his son’s team had prior to kickoff, it proved that it’s got a chance to be everything it says it is. It’s got eyes on it, too. 

Time for it to do it again.