There really aren’t words.
Vanderbilt won 10 games for the first time in the 135-year history of the program. They hung the most points on Tennessee since 1923. They only lost two games, both on the road to ranked opponents, and went undefeated at home. They beat four teams that were ranked when we played them. They are currently the #14 team in the country.
Diego Pavia may be going to NYC for the Heisman ceremony. I have no expectation of him winning it, but he should absolutely be there. And he deserves a statue on campus, because he believed in Vanderbilt football more than we believed in ourselves. He sued the NCAA to keep playing football for Vanderbilt. Read that sentence again.
We are playing with house money. Even if we lose whatever bowl we go to, we won 10. No real difference between 10-2 and 10-3, and 11-2 would be incredible. Owing to the bullshit farm that is the College Football Playoff, the games where a similarly-ranked SEC team might normally expect to play are now off limits (the Cotton, the Peach) or are not on the board because of the overexpansion of the SEC (the Citrus, possibly even the Outback or Gator Bowls). It’s entirely possible we could wind up in the same bowl we got with eight wins. Or six. It will suck, but only a fool expects the SEC to do right by Vandy in any instance.
But it happened. We all saw it. They went out there, fought Tennessee to a draw for a half in Neyland Stadium, and then ran them out of their own house in the second half. It would have been ashes in the mouth to tie our record for all-time wins and then lose to the Vols when history was in the balance, but it didn’t happen.
And now, Jared Curtis – by some measures, the #1 prep prospect in the country and certainly in the top five of five-star recruits – flipped at the 11th hour to Vandy. The kind of player we would never have gotten, the kind of player I said we should just cheat and open the checkbook for, a player who opens at least the tantalizing possibility that this is not a fluke, not a flash in the pan, not entirely down to Pavia, but a real change in Vanderbilt football and a new floor of seven wins and a competitive future…
This could be the beginning of the age of gold. Right now, Vandy men’s and women’s basketball are both ranked and both undefeated – but not ranked as high or with as many wins as Vandy football. If there was any doubt whether Candice Story Lee had made her bones, she is now the Goldmother and no disputing it, and well earned.
But the bigger thing for me is that I got pulled back in, in a way I never expected to. I was done. I had accepted that our future consisted of being a feeder team for bigger programs to fleece. I never expected that they’d find the money to make payroll against the rest of the SEC, let alone find guys willing to stay a couple years and close the deal. It’s hard to be invested in something when you can’t tell if the people in charge care about it or not, and that was an open question for decades at Vanderbilt. But for better or worse, you’ve got to make uncapped salary and unlimited free agency work for you…and we did.
I bought a #2 jersey. First current Vanderbilt jersey I’ve purchased in twenty-plus years. But I will treasure it because one undersized spitfire from New Mexico believed in Vandy enough for all of us until we came around to his way of thinking.
Diego Pavia, the greatest football Commodore of all time. Well done young man.