As the dust settled on then-unraked Vanderbilt’s 40-35 upset win over No. 1 Alabama last October, Crimson Tide fans and the college football world as a whole looked on in abject shock. The top-ranked team in the nation, coming off a climactic victory over No. 2 Georgia, had fallen to one of the most consistent bottom-dwellers in the SEC and all of the Power Four.
Head coach Kalen DeBoer, who was in his first season in Tuscaloosa, said after the game that he was “extremely disappointed, frustrated, whatever you name.” Linebacker Deontae Lawson simply said, “I’m hurt.”
Since that point, we’ve gotten many data points to contextualize the upset. Alabama has dropped four games since then, three of them against unranked opponents, and has faced significant adversity early in the tenure of its new head coach.
More pertinently, Vanderbilt has proven that its win wasn’t a fluke. Under fifth-year head coach Clark Lea, the Commodores have cast off their bottom-dweller label and, now ranked No. 16 in the nation, have entered college football’s upper echelon early in the 2025 season. Their 5-0 start marks the team’s first such record since 2008 and its second in the past 80 years.
These aren’t just easy wins, either, and it hasn’t been a cakewalk to the current No. 16 spot. Along the way, Vanderbilt went to Blacksburg and beat Virginia Tech by 24 before traveling to Columbia to handle then-No. 11 South Carolina 31-7. The ESPN FPI ranking, which relies on a stat-driven simulator intended to drown out the noise of flashy win-loss records, has the Commodores No. 14, ahead of teams like Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Texas Tech.
Such success has been rare across this program’s history. Before last year’s 7-6 campaign, the team hadn’t seen a winning season since now-Penn State head coach James Franklin strung together a pair of 9-7 years in 2012 and 2013. The team went 7-6 in 2008 under coach Bobby Johnson, and it was the first over-.500 record since 1982.
To put it in perspective — the last time Vanderbilt football put together three winning seasons, there were several decades until Lea’s birth. Harry Truman was president of the United States, and the country was closer to the invention of the telephone than it was to the present day.
It’s a slightly peculiar case. With respective records of 2-10, 5-7 and 2-10 in his first three seasons in Nashville, he didn’t have the same immediate turnaround as some coaches — think last year’s Curt Cignetti taking Indiana to the playoffs in his first season — but he clearly has found the rhythm in a place where it’s inherently hard to win thanks to high academic standards and residence in the SEC.
The team’s metrics are rock-solid, as in the previous three years including the 2023 2-10 campaign, the Commodores have gone from 129th in scoring defense to 50th and now 31st. More significantly, they’ve gone from 103rd in scoring offense to 73rd and now fourth at 49.0 points per game.
After 2023, offensive coordinator Tim Beck came from New Mexico State alongside former Aggies quarterback Diego Pavia, while Lea became defensive playcaller. The scheme change, which includes a bevy of east to west pre-snap movement and utilization of Pavia’s dual-threat dynamism, has worked out swimmingly.
More than just coordinators, the 2024 staff change brought in a new strength coach in Georgia Southern’s Robert Stiner. Since his arrival, the team has apparently seen both speed and mass increases across the board, which is a lethal combination for any level of football but especially in the SEC.
Most importantly, the turnaround of the past couple of years has been thanks to a cultural shift — more specifically, being able to see that the team is capable of great things.
“Last season was important for us in terms of getting some of those breakthrough moments to see, ‘Hey, this is something we can do,'” Lea said in reflection on 2024. “I think this season has been about the confidence to dominate, to have a dominant mindset when we take the field. That’s a tangible shift.”
Belief is a powerful drug, and since the Alabama game last year, this Commodore team seems to have gotten hooked. Winning its first five games by 20-plus points is strong evidence of that idea. Garnering an appearance on College Gameday, which has only been to a Vanderbilt game once in 2008 against No. 13 Auburn, is even more proof.
All this stands even if Alabama secures a victory this week. Not long ago, the notion of an undefeated, highly ranked Vanderbilt team with genuine aspirations of contending would have been ludicrous. Thanks to a head coach who stuck with it after three pretty poor years and rehauled his staff to ensure improvement, the team is in great shape for now and the future.
And it’s also ready to do whatever it takes to win.
“When I get back on the bus, I don’t want to be able to feel my shoulder, feel my neck,” linebacker Langston Patterson said this week. “I don’t want to be able to walk the next morning. I want to go out there and give it everything I’ve got and dominate.”
What’s left is to see if Alabama will fall prey to that belief two years in a row.
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