Vanderbilt Football Returns Plenty of Production, But Improvement Has to be Earned

Vanderbilt football started its fall camp Wednesday ahead of the 2025-2026 season that begins at the end of August. Going into this year, the Commodores have a luxury that few teams in the FBS have: returning production.

Vanderbilt returns 69 percent of its production from the 2024-2025 season, the seventh best returning production rate in college football. The team brings back key pieces on the offense in quarterback Diego Pavia, tight end Eli Stowers and wide receivers Junior Sherrill and Richie Hoskins.

On the defensive side, Vanderbilt brings back its core of Langston Patterson, Martel Hight, Randon Fontenette and Bryan Longwell.

In an era of NIL and the transfer portal, maintaining the core of the offense and defense of a team year-to-year has become a rarity. Returning production brings a familiarity amongst the players, which can help with maintaining team chemistry and getting a head start on the team’s mission at hand. 

Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea talked about the value of having a roster full of familiar faces after the first day of camp.

“Those guys that return, they know how we operate,” Lea said. “It gives you a chance to be efficient, to have expectations and have peer-to-peer accountability.”

But just because there are a lot of returning players to a team does not automatically imply that the team will improve and post a better record than last season. Having an already-installed chemistry within the team needs to lead to accountability rather than complacency. With all things, improvement has to be earned and Lea is aware of it.

“It can also be a bit of a crutch. It can be something that becomes a negative if you think somehow that entitles you to being better. We have to be very careful to use the good of it and hold each other accountable to our expectations,” Lea said.

For the program to continue off the progress it made last season, accountability and hard work are going to need to prevail, but given Vanderbilt’s schedule, progressing off a 7-6 record will not come easy. With the second hardest schedule in the country according to ESPN analytics, it magnifies the importance of maintaining plenty of contributors.

Lea did emphasize how crucial it is to have the biggest defensive contributors back for one final season. Vanderbilt’s defense ranked in the bottom half of the FBS in total defense (76th) and ranked 124th in the country in third down defense, allowing opponents to convert on 47.5 percent of their third down opportunities.

“Defensively, we got basically everything in right now, which is huge. But we have to chase progress. We can’t sit back and just assume that we are one year better. We got to go make some things happen,” Lea said.

Vanderbilt’s experienced roster will start its campaign to improve on last season’s success on Aug. 30 against Charleston Southern.

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