I don’t know what to tell you. Every time we think we’ve made a step forward, we stumble about five yards back. We don’t have an everyday running back, we have one receiver and that one gets keyed on constantly, and our experiment to see if you can win a game in the SEC with no linebackers is, so far, a disaster. Much as I would love the students to all be there in the first quarter, we should start with making sure the football team is there first and work up from there.
It’s going to be an ugly year for Vanderbilt sports, what with the complete loss of our entire recruiting class from last year in basketball and a football team that looks like being .500 at the halfway mark…with Florida, Georgia and Texas A&M left to play, not to mention at a Tennessee team that’s probably good enough to beat us. And that’s before factoring in the cloud still hanging over the school from the events of the offseason.
But the worst thought about Vanderbilt athletics is this: this may be the restoration of normal service. This is the best run of Commodore football since 1974-75. No football coach since 1948 has more than one winning season at Vanderbilt, and we’ve beaten the Vols exactly eight times since the war. Eight times in sixty-seven seasons. That’s not a rivalry, that’s an abattoir. We can do well in women’s hoop, we can do really well in baseball, but let’s face it, that’s not what this league grades on, is it?
The thing is, we as fans want to believe. We want to. We desperately want to think that things can be different. But nobody else does. No other teams, no media, no neutral observers. Everybody, literally everybody else, just assumes that we will inevitably revert to the mean and be good for two wins a season. Teams that don’t have a conference win, teams that have been getting blown out, teams in disarray on the verge of firing their coach: they all look at Vanderbilt on the schedule and automatically write down W. We beat Ole Miss five of six coming into this season, and they still had that game down as a win.
This is a bet. We’re betting a nontrivial chunk of Martha Ingram’s money that if we pay for a good young coach, pay for his staff, pay for new facilities and pay the freight to try to be competitive with the rest of the league, we can be. Good enough to compete, good enough not to be an automatic W, good enough that we’re not treated like a punchline, good enough to be taken seriously against Alabama and Florida and LSU and Georgia and Texas A&M and South Carolina and…
…that’s really the problem, isn’t it? We’re stuck in a conference whose schools are basically feeder institutions for the football teams, one where the SEC routinely has half the top 10 teams in the country. Every year, we get Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and Ole Miss, plus Tennessee and Kentucky and now Missouri for our trouble, and then people give us shit when we don’t want to pile Northwestern and Ohio State on top of that. Ask Cal how playing both the Buckeyes and Wildcats went for them, and they got them both at home. Our season is an uphill climb, every single year. Our best performance since 1915 was good for 4th place in the SEC East, and a bowl game five miles from campus. A top-20 recruiting class in the nation was good for a whopping ninth place in the conference. We’ve got four-star athletes that we’ve never had before…and they’re lining up against five-stars.
Anybody who’s watched the last two years knows this isn’t the same old Vandy. The biggest fear I have is that it won’t make a difference. The SEC may well have reached a spot where our football program is simply not structurally capable of being a peer competitor. We need a lot of money, a lot of time, and a shit-ton of patience if we’re going to change the culture and change the fate of our program. I don’t know how long the money will last, but time is running out and patience may be in short supply in the places where it’s needed most.