“Fear God and give glory to Him for the hour of His judgement is come.”
-Rev. 14:7
40-35.
Think about that. The last time Vanderbilt football had a sweat like this was probably…1996? Maybe? When a 3rd and 37 pass for a 4th quarter touchdown gave us a lead over Notre Dame 7-6 with minutes left? I am sure everyone in that stadium was just waiting for the hammer to fall on Saturday, and yet…it never did. 60 minutes of SEC football and Alabama, undefeated and ranked #1 in the country, never led once. Not once. If you told me a Vanderbilt football team at any point in human history would give the Crimson Tide a 40-piece in the snotbox, I would have burned you for witchcraft.
And yet…it was not a brick fight, it was not a fluke, it was not a dick-tripping, in Spencer Hall’s words – Vandy just came out and beat that ass at the point of attack for 60 minutes. They played toe to toe with the top ranked team in the country, with THE football power of the last 15 years, a Mount Rushmore program in the history of college football, and the night ended with Vanderbilt fans (including several of my friends) parading the goalposts three miles down Broadway to throw them into the Cumberland River. Where the next day, the Nashville fire department helpfully fished them out and returned them to campus so they could be cut up and sold for souvenirs to defray the conference’s $100,000 fine for rushing the field.
This doesn’t happen. Vanderbilt had never beaten a top-5 ranked opponent ever. The biggest win I can remember like that was when the Dores got over on then-#6 South Carolina in 2007, and didn’t even finish the season with a winning record. Yes, the 2013 team tore ass through Florida, Georgia and Tennessee in the same year, but it was the second of five wins in seven seasons over the Vols, and Florida after Meyer and Georgia before Kirby. And yes, this is Bama after Saban, but it’s a Saban roster and a team that beat #1 last week to be #1 this week.
More to the point, it was the Death Star. It was the game you could write down a L in ink every year. Bama was a permanent opponent in the division days for 20 years, and it was a guaranteed loss, with the only question being “blowout loss, or brick fight loss with a back door cover.” The last time Vanderbilt won, I was 12 years old and on the other side of it, sitting with my dad in his old silver truck in Gardendale in disbelief as Paul Kennedy and Doug Layton called a desultory and lifeless defeat in Ray Perkins’ losing 1984 season while Vandy was still riding the fumes of the McIntyre renaissance. And my dad said “well that doesn’t happen very often,” because I think the last Vandy win had been 1969.
This should not have happened. This should have been inconceivable. A Vanderbilt team that could get handled on the road at Georgia State should never have been in the same ballpark with Bama.
And yet.
Something feels materially different. It isn’t just taking then-#6 Missouri to double OT before losing in heartbreak, or beating Virginia Tech in OT to open the season, or handily defenestrating Alcorn State in a way that doesn’t usually happen (it took miracle stuff to get by Tennessee State a couple years ago, if you want a straight HBCU comp). Not only are the Dores mostly handling business, they aren’t getting blown out and blown away. Hell, you make one field goal in Columbia and pick up the first down one more time in the 4th quarter in Atlanta, and this Vandy team is 5-0 and probably in the conversation about making the 12-team playoff.
But the bigger difference is that it doesn’t feel real – but it does. Vandy had success during the Brigadoon era, but it always felt like smoke and mirrors – we weren’t dragging teams we should beat (well, other than 2012 Tennessee), we were taking advantage of mistakes and still getting destroyed by power foes. The wins were close and the losses were not. This feels like it’s legitimately happening, somehow – we’re not backing into it, we’re not fluking into it, we are somehow going toe-to-toe with top teams and trading blows at equal strength. Diego Pavia doesn’t know it’s a damn show, he thinks it’s a damn fight.
And that’s another thing. This was achieved by basically opening the checkbook and purchasing the entire New Mexico State offense, players and coaches and all, and it is working. It’s not sustainable, and the question will always be, what happens next year when hipster CFB’s favorite quarterback is not around. But that’s not a now problem. Instead, Vanderbilt is America’s darling, other SEC programs are openly cheering for us to beat their hated rival, people are happy for us in a way that I never felt from anywhere under Franklin. Hell, there will probably be 49 and a half states rooting for us to do the same thing to Auburn in a month.
But it also feels uncomfortable. Ominous. You stack it up against things like finding the perfect Nerf blasters after all these years, or USMobile finally announcing Apple Watch support, or American Giant finally bringing back the fleece in the size I need, or stumbling across three 12-packs of Baja Blast Zero Sugar at the grocery store, and it’s hard not to feel like God is trying to throw me a bone and give me some last fleeting moments of joy before the end of the world arrives. Like we’re settling all family business before the onset of the darkness. I do not like this feeling, I wish I didn’t have it, but the Cubs finally winning in 2016 is my precedent. Joy may cometh in the morning, but it gets to be night fast in the autumn.
So the lesson, such as it is, is this: embrace the now, live now, enjoy today, don’t defer happiness. And worrying means you suffer twice.