Two More, Vanderbilt Football; Column

Will it be remembered as the first group of trailblazers to take this program to the College Football Playoff? Or will it leave Vanderbilt with a gap in its resume when this is all said and done? 

In any case, Clark Lea’s team will be remembered as one of the best–if not the best–to ever take the field at FirstBank Stadium in Vanderbilt uniforms. That’s never been this group's goal, though. They’ve intentionally set their bar higher than anything that can lead to complacency. 

Lea has built this thing so that AP Top 25 ranking isn’t good enough to satisfy his team, he’s built it so a few ranked wins isn’t the goal. The one thing that this Vanderbilt team has set out to do is still yet to be accomplished. 

"Gotta win it all," Pavia told me in a one-on-one interview prior to spring practice. "The natty, that's all we got on our mind. We gotta take it day by day. We got our standards out there, our goals out there and the standard has raised so we just gotta take it day by day and let the players compete."

It sounded outlandish at the time, but everything that Pavia declared nine months ago is within reach for this Vanderbilt team. It will take a tremendous run down the stretch, but Vanderbilt likely controls its own destiny at this point. 

The Commodores are ranked 14th in the College Football Playoff rankings, but if it finishes the season 2-0 it’s difficult to envision that things wouldn’t shake themselves out enough for them to find their way into the field. Winning out is easier said than done, though. 

Mark Stoops’ Kentucky team is playing its best football of the year and has won three in a row–including a win over Auburn, which took Vanderbilt to overtime–while Tennessee is firmly a top 25 team. This group will have to do something difficult, but it’s got good news. 

The first step for this Vanderbilt team is acknowledging what’s ahead of it–which is a gauntlet that will allow it to gauge where it’s really at–the second is believing it’s got the capability to do it, the third is having enough physically to–which it appears to after its bye week–and the fourth is executing it. 

Time to see if it can do it. 

“We don't ignore that,” Lea said of the playoff situation. “We embrace it. I mean it, not even embrace it. I mean, that's our talk. Like we own that, because we've talked about it since January 7. So that's something we embrace, and we were striving for. And I said this to the team today in the hotel. I mean, that we're out of opportunities. I mean, everything's at stake, and the mission is winning. So if at some point we're dealt a blow, we'll still be on mission, but until otherwise, we're aiming for those playoffs, and that's important to us right now.”