I don’t talk much about Vanderbilt football in this space anymore. Nor in the space where I used to publish weekly during the season. The exhilaration of the Brigadoon era crashed and burned once our best success in a century got strip-mined for the benefit of Joe Paterno’s squad, and so far, we’ve proven we can hit the non-Brigadoon highlights since 1982: beat Tennessee, win six games, go to a bowl (and despite the loss, we might be the first SEC team happy to go to Shreveport…ever, really). The question is, can we beat that? Many have tried, but only two non-Brigadoon coaches have made it even to six wins since that Hall of Fame Bowl in 1982, and one promptly lost the bowl game while the other crashed and burned, going 1-5 down the stretch before the punter made MVP of the bowl and preserved a winning season.
The aspirational model for what our football team could become definitely seems to be Stanford. I mean, we went out and hired their DC and everything. But apparently in 2016, Stanford didn’t sell out their 50,000 stadium. Not once. And they’re raising ticket prices. Now, in fairness, Stanford has gotten themselves into a situation where their two biggest-drawing opponents are in the same year (Cal and Notre Dame) and the other biggest attractions at present (UCLA, Oregon) are in the same year as well. When USC is the only remotely interesting home game, it’s probably a tough sell anyway. But this is a program that’s gone to MULTIPLE Rose Bowls in recent memory, its the beneficiary of unlimited slobber-worship by the college football media, and has a benefactor who showers the athletic department with literally millions of dollars a year. They can’t fill 50K.
There are those who argue that Vanderbilt football is a sleeping giant, a Stanford-esque overnight sensation waiting to happen, and all that we have to do is build a new modernized stadium and mysteriously winning will breed winning and we’ll find ourselves going head-up with Alabama and Florida and battling for a playoff berth every year. These people are insane. The cost of catching up with the rest of the SEC – in facilities, in mindshare, in media coverage – can’t be measured in dollars and cents. It would require a cultural change on campus, it would require a complete transformation in the college football media, and it would require years of repetition before people got in their heads that Same Old Vandy was gone for good. And if you don’t believe that, look at what happened in 2014, when it only took the first half of a weird and rain-delayed game for the world to proclaim that things were back to normal on West End.
So there’s a spectrum. At one end, we drop football altogether as a sport. At the other, we do whatever it takes to keep pace with the giants of college football, irrespective of the cost or impact on the university. Right now, the two factors that are orbiting one another are stadium location and conference affiliation. While Vanderbilt is a peer and competitive member of the SEC in every sport other than football, only one thing matters in the Southeastern Conference and it’s the one thing at which we happen not to be a competitive peer. Meanwhile, the plan appears to be that instead of spending the money on a new on-campus stadium or a massive refurbishment of the one we already have, we’ll borrow someone else’s off-campus stadium and wait to see what happens, not least because an on-campus stadium is a huge chunk of property and they aren’t making any more of that.
At this point, I don’t think we’re ever going to see a larger stadium for Vanderbilt than what we have now. There’s simply no percentage in it. By the same token, I can’t think of anyone in major college football playing their games in an off-campus stadium other than the LA schools, and that represents special circumstances as neither UCLA nor USC has ever had an on-campus facility in the modern era (they shared the Coliseum until the 80s and UCLA has been at the Rose Bowl ever since). So look at Tulane, which is the poster child for a school that bailed out of big-time athletics – and even they have built a new 30,000 seat stadium, on campus, at a cost of $75 million. Now we have a dollar figure to play with. Probably safe to assume that any rebuilt Dudley Field will cost roughly similar. At that point, you have to think the powers in Kirkland Hall are looking at this notional MLS stadium and thinking “that’s $75 million we don’t have to spend, never mind the potential use value of getting the Dudley land for something else.” I get that. I don’t like it one bit, but I totally see how they get from here to there.
So. Are we going to chase the rest of the SEC no matter what? We are a founding member of the SEC and a competitive peer in every single sport we participate in…except for one, and that one happens to be the thing that defines the SEC and all it really cares about. We can continue to power our way through in baseball, in tennis and golf and cross-country, and possibly even in basketball behind CBD and CSW, but the price of doing that is bashing our football into the rest of the conference every year with one hand tied behind its back. Can that be done? Hell yes, we’ve done it for decades. But it’s unlikely to build a fan base or bring in additional revenue apart from our one-fourteenth share of the TV and bowl money. It’s also worth noting that Brigadoon aside, our baseline improvement is largely a function of playing twelve games a year rather than eleven; those five-win seasons in the Dinardo era would probably have been six in the 21st century.
That’s really the only question. If we don’t chase the SEC, and nothing happens to separate football from the rest of college athletics, we’ll almost certainly end up somewhere else – Conference USA, the Sun Belt, some lower division altogether. I don’t think Vanderbilt will dump football as a sport until football itself goes away, though, and as an example I offer good ol’ Birmingham-Southern College, which in 2006 abandoned its several-year experiment as a Big South Division-I school and reverted to D-III. The first thing they did in D-III? They ADDED football – which they hadn’t played since 1939 – and committed to building an on-campus facility for it. The whole point of leaving Division I was supposedly financial, yet they added the most expensive sport a school can play.
So what now? The optimal scenario: play elsewhere for free until we can figure out what the future of Vanderbilt football looks like, then build accordingly on campus as required. But that leaves too many variables in the hands of others, and the uncertainty will do nothing for the team, the fans or the perception of a program that already gets Hillary Clinton levels of media regard. At last call, the future for a Vandy supporter is the same as it’s always been: unknowable but grim.