It shouldn’t bother me this much, and I’m happy for him, but…it kind of sucks. Herb Hand, perhaps the most social-media-savvy of all college football assistant coaches, apparently shot an episode of Chopped last summer and it will air in a month or two. At the time, he was the offensive line coach of Vandy, and apparently was all in his star-V gear and everything. But at this point, you know where that staff is now. It’s that state school in Pennsylvania that plummeted to the abysmal depths of a 7-win season and took the entire Vanderbilt staff in an attempt to turn it around. And for their trouble, right now they’re sitting on what is widely regarded as the #1 recruiting class for the 2015 signing year.
We can’t have nice things in Vandy athletics. Our hotshot basketball recruiter will get itchy feet after a year. Our talented class with three NBA draft picks will go 1-3 in three NCAA tournament appearances. Our #1-overall pitcher will lose the ability to find the plate in the first round of regionals against Michigan. We’ll have 48 hours to enjoy our first back-to-back bowl game victories, ever, before ESPN delivers our coach to State College because he didn’t go to Los Angeles or Austin first. And then, when we land one of the most sought-after prospects in college football to replace him, we’ll get slotted 12th in the preseason out of 14 teams. A Kentucky team that we beat three years straight, an Ole Miss squad we beat four years out of six, a Vol squad that has to come to Nashville after losing twice and replacing their entire offensive line – they all have the Vandy game pencilled in as a win.
We get no respect for trying. We get no respect for “doing things the right way.” We tell ourselves we are to make us feel better, but supposedly Stanford was out there “doing things the right way” when they got hammered by Cal seven times in eight years, when they were winning one game a year, and do you know when people started giving them credit for it? When they went to three straight BCS bowls. Pity? Sometimes. Sympathy? Rarely. Respect? Never.
The fact is, we’re only going to get respect when we start beating people over and over and over and over again. When it can’t be dismissed as a fluke play or a lucky bounce or a talented player or a coach who caught lightning in a beer bottle. And even then, as long as we have fewer seats in the stadium, fewer fans who only set foot on a college campus for games, less free-floating money wandering into the pockets of players and prospects, we’re not going to be considered a peer with the rest of our conference. Because, to be blunt, they are not our peers.
Which begs the question…what are we still doing here?