Cory Batey. Caleb Azubike. And Brian Kimbrow, by some accounts the top high school football prospect in the state of Tennessee. And then, late the same night, Jaydrick Declouet of Louisiana jumps on the pile. In one day, as many top prospects as Vanderbilt would get for years. Twelve – TWELVE – commits for next season. Some of the top talent in Tennessee and Georgia alike. And in Kimbrow, a burner with 4.2 speed rated by some services as the second-best all-purpose back in the nation.
In. The. Nation.
It’s been almost fifty years since Art Guepe said “There is no way you can be Harvard Monday through Friday and be Alabama on Saturday.” The last Vanderbilt coach to win a bowl game (before Bobby Johnson in 2008) wasn’t bitter, supposedly, but matter-of-fact about the incompatibility of top-ten academics and top-ten football.
And Coach James Franklin has said, in a word, bullshit.
His pitch to the kids, supposedly, is “why not?” Why not play the best football in the country and get a top-10 education to boot? Other coaches are warning you how tough the academics are – do they think you’re not smart enough? You can get an Ivy-caliber degree and you can play on an SEC football team right away – would you rather sit on the bench for years at Auburn or Tennessee, where you can be good, or would you rather come to Vanderbilt, where you can play right away, get a killer degree, and have a shot at becoming immortal?
The trick, obviously, is keeping the commitments through National Signing Day in February. A lot can happen. But I suspect that a lot of the kids from this year’s class – the Josh Gradys and Lafonte Thorogoods – will get a ton of playing time, and the current kids will see that Coach Franklin is serious about building the talent behind them, and he will point to how quickly that school in Palo Alto went from 1-10 to the Orange Bowl. And Kimbrow has already said his word is good, and he’s not taking any more visits.
The most amazing part, to me, is that Tennessee is officially running scared – we now have triple as many kids in the fold as they do, and their fans are freaking out. All of a sudden, we’re getting the kind of message board abuse that was usually directed at Florida or Alabama. And the screams of the haters are…magical.
Is this real? This can’t be real.
Other conferences have something else. The Big East was built on basketball from day one. The ACC became so. The Pac-10 was known for playing every sport there was, especially Olympic sports. But the SEC has always been about football. Three teams can hit the College World Series and finish 1-2-3 in the nation, Kentucky can be one of the great powers of basketball, the Lady Vols can rule women’s hoops, but all of that is secondary in the Southeastern Conference, where you are judged in your very essence on your football team.
And make no mistake, we have been terrible. Absolutely terrible. The competitive era ended around the time that Coach Guepe packed it in, and in five decades you could count the bowl bids on one hand (and the bowl wins on one finger). 0-for-SEC records? Common. Blowouts by five or six touchdowns? Frequent. Seasons measured on how often we managed to cover the spread on a ranked opponent? Standard.
We don’t take recruits away from Tennessee, or Notre Dame, or Stanford. It just doesn’t happen. Our guys turn down Columbia or Tulane or Western Kentucky to play football in the West End. We get a thrill in our heart to have a couple of three-star players in the recruiting class. Even the success is touched with tragedy, as in the case of Rajaan Bennett (RIP), the five-star running back who never lived to set foot on campus as a student.
We’re a doormat. We’re a disaster area. Duke can win an ACC title, and Northwestern can go to the Rose Bowl, and Stanford and Georgia Tech can play in Orange Bowls, but it doesn’t happen for us. We don’t get the talent, we don’t get the breaks, we don’t belong in the SEC.
But that’s not what’s happening.
It could be us. We could win games. We could win bowls. We could be ranked. We could take what happened in the first half of 2008 and make it real and make it regular. We could make people nervous about playing Vanderbilt, and not because they might overlook us. We could prove we deserve to be in the SEC.
Maybe it will all go to hell. Maybe we’ll be 0-8 by November and everything will be falling apart. Maybe it’ll be back to “Same Old Vandy” and we’ll look back at this summer and kick ourselves for being delusional.
But maybe not. I want to believe. And now it’s possible…