Vanderbilt is relevant in sports now and it goes well beyond Diego Pavia and the football team's success. But it took a serious attitude adjustment and plenty of investment to get to this point.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Before students paraded the goalposts from campus to the Cumberland River last October after beating Alabama, before the 5-0 start to this season that has given oxygen to new expectations and before one of the most impressive physical transformations of an athletic footprint in the country, the rot of cynicism around Vanderbilt football was as much a part of the undergraduate experience as the campus’ annual Rites of Spring music festival and buckets of beer at the local honky tonks.
Over decades, in fact, the inferiority complex of being the SEC’s doormat was so profoundly woven into everyday life here that Vanderbilt’s coaches would often find themselves recruiting against disparaging comments made about the program by guides giving campus tours — which often included prospective football players.
“It’s not anyone’s fault,” said Clark Lea, the Commodores’ 43-year-old head coach who played fullback on Vanderbilt teams that went a combined 6-29 during his three seasons. “It’s over time. That’s trauma. Those are callouses that are built up. It crystallizes and it becomes the attitude toward which you approach something.”
Lea, a Nashville native, lived amidst that cynicism long before it was his job to change it. So did athletics director Candice Lee, a women’s basketball star in the late 1990s. And in a way, so did Tim Corbin, the 24-year baseball coach who managed to transcend the school’s athletic reputation and build one of the most unlikely powerhouses in college sports.
All of them had spent a huge chunk of their lives driving every day from their homes to this campus in the middle of a city that has transformed itself from a nondescript mid-sized Southern town to an international destination that has managed to cram hotels and theme bars into corners of concrete that longtime Nashvillians wouldn’t have even known existed.
But as much as the skyline around campus changed, Vanderbilt athletics never really did.
“The city is optimizing,” Lee said. “Vanderbilt wants to be considered a very relevant part of the city. We have not always acted that way.”
The narrative around the SEC’s only private school has changed in ways that are most apparent through the lens of football.
When Vanderbilt visits No. 10 Alabama on Saturday, it will do so as the 16th-ranked team in the Associated Press poll, led by a 24-year-old quarterback who started his career at a junior college and New Mexico State — an anomaly unto itself at an academically elite school that accepted a record-low 4.7 percent of applicants this year.
But the larger story of Vanderbilt’s turn in the national spotlight goes beyond Diego Pavia and even the football program, whose 5-0 start to this season has been framed by just-finished construction projects in both end zones that has turned an aging, below-standard football stadium into a palace.
For decades, Vanderbilt supporters and alumni wondered why their school couldn’t be like Duke or Stanford or even Northwestern, whose football highs eclipsed anything the Commodores ever experienced.
And yet, as college sports transitioned into a semi-professional era, it’s Vanderbilt that has emerged in many ways as a model of athletic success on a campus where elite academics have always led the way.
“The landscape was dramatically starting to shift, and we kept saying, ‘Well, it’s time to lean in,’” Lee said. “When other people might be lamenting how come it couldn’t be the way it used to be, I just think it created this unique moment where when everybody else might be stalled a little bit, we could actually use this to our advantage to create clarity for ourselves. Maybe some people wouldn’t have expected that.”
Why would they, when Vanderbilt had never done anything like it before?
'No tolerance for mediocrity'
Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier was an unlikely figure to be at the center of a college sports boom. Growing up in West Berlin before and during the reunification of Germany, he had little knowledge of or connection to American college sports.
The first in his family to attend university, he received a fellowship from the German government that brought him to Southern Cal in 1988 where he met an American lexicon full of sports metaphors like “getting across the goal line” or “hitting a home run” that he didn’t understand. At the English language center, they encouraged him to attend sporting events and No. 2 USC’s 31-22 victory over No. 6 UCLA at the Rose Bowl hooked him forever.
“I experienced, really, what college athletics can do to a university community firsthand,” he told Yahoo Sports. “That was very powerful.”
Previously provost at University of Chicago, Diermeier took over in Nashville during the height of COVID in 2020 and made it clear he viewed the athletic department “as much a part of Vanderbilt as the law school” while understanding that the infrastructure did not exist to support a program that could compete in the SEC.
But at schools of Vanderbilt’s academic stature, the balance with athletics has historically been fraught with political tension between the forces that want to be more like Harvard and those who want to be more like Auburn.
“We had to be crystal clear that we had to stop looking over our shoulder and comparing ourselves with other universities,” Diermeier said. “We can pay attention to what the Ivies are doing, but at the end of the day, we need to do what is consistent with who we are and a key component of our identity is that we do everything from Bach to baseball.
“We have no tolerance for mediocrity anywhere.”
One of Diermeier’s top priorities was launching the $300 million Vandy United campaign, which began with a $100 million investment from the university to the athletic department and has now eclipsed $370 million. That money has spawned a dizzying array of construction projects across a variety of sports, including the football stadium end zones and state-of-the-art basketball practice facility that opened last December. Ultimately, it will also include a football operations center and renovations to add a second grandstand level and suites at the baseball stadium.
“When you go to campus now and walk around, it’s a transformative place,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “Some of it goes back [before Diermeier], but he’s stepped on the accelerator. They’ve really worked to build upon the foundation of great university, great city, great conference.”
Lee, who was named athletics director essentially concurrent with Diermeier’s arrival, was also empowered to make coaching changes if necessary in areas where Vanderbilt’s programs were struggling.
Shortly after hiring longtime UConn assistant coach Shea Ralph, Vanderbilt’s nine-year NCAA tournament drought ended in women’s basketball. And in 2024, Lee fired Jerry Stackhouse, whose five seasons produced nothing more than two NIT bids. His replacement, Mark Byington, mined the transfer portal for enough talent to get Vanderbilt to the NCAA men’s tournament for the first time since 2017.
When Vanderbilt upset No. 1-ranked Alabama 40-35 last Oct. 5, Byington’s team hadn’t played a game yet. But as his players celebrated on the field among their fellow students, it was like an earthquake whose aftershocks were felt for months — including in Memorial Gymnasium when his team beat the likes of Tennessee and Kentucky.
“I think it was more than just beating a team for football,” Byington said. “I think it permeated confidence throughout the other teams.”
But the transformation of Vanderbilt’s relationship with athletics goes beyond a dollar figure, a facility or a coaching hire. As one longtime Vanderbilt official told Yahoo Sports, the emphasis on athletics is both in-your-face in nearly every element of campus life these days and yet is receiving very little if any pushback from faculty. Student attendance at football games is no longer in the service of irony.
“I’ll be honest. From a recruiting standpoint, last year and this year, we’ve had recruiting visits on weekends and we haven’t done that before,” Corbin said. “There was a reason for that. Why would you want to use a recruiting weekend when there’s more participation from the [visiting] crowd? That’s not really what you want your athletes to see, but it’s completely different now.”
And while administrators of course speak delicately about the academic side, it’s clear that Vanderbilt is in a different place now than it’s ever been. That doesn’t necessarily mean the school has changed its standards but there's now an effort to make things work in terms of admissions and transfers and aligning academic support — “radical collaboration,” as Diermeier calls it — to give athletics a chance at success.
“There was a mid-90s stretch where I think the school was still trying to figure out whether it wanted to be an SEC school,” Lea said. “I think there was real conflict at the administrative level around that, feeling like you couldn’t do both.”
And now?
“We have a partnership there where we understand our responsibility to this campus to bring people here that are going to engage in the education,” Lea said. “And the better we understand that and the more responsible we are with it allows us to deepen that partnership, to get the people here that are going to help us move the product forward on the field.”
Getting with the times
To hear Lee tell it, this breakthrough moment is the production of a well-planned strategy where “you’re starting to see the fruits of our labor” with every step intentionally leading to this great narrative shift from “Same Ol' Vandy” to a legitimate program that is functioning well across the board.
“There’s a change internally with how we are carrying ourselves and being unapologetic about it,” she said.
But there was also some good fortune. As Lea describes it, the arrival of the NIL and transfer portal era unexpectedly worked to Vanderbilt’s advantage, particularly in football, because it papered over the lack of investment in facilities and infrastructure that had built up over decades.
It took a while, though, for Lea to figure that out.
Initially, he believed that Vanderbilt’s “holistic approach would be valued at a higher level than the dollars and cents” that players could pursue in name, image and likeness. He was wrong and paid for it with a 2-10 record in 2023, his third season.
“We had a 1,000-yard rusher in 2022 and returned the offensive line in ‘23 and we couldn’t move the ball and it was like, 'Alright, this isn’t going to work,'” he said. “We have to reimagine our place in the world. There weren’t assurances at that point we were going to participate [in NIL] at the level we needed to and I was trying to learn what that was going to be. These were conversations that weren’t part of the initial blueprint. How do you come up with money for a roster? Resources to retain people?”
Lea was forced to make major changes — “painstaking yet necessary,” he said — including roster composition, an adjustment of internal systems and personnel. That’s the genesis of the marriage with Pavia, his former head coach at New Mexico State Jerry Kill (now Vanderbilt’s chief consultant to the head coach) and his offensive coordinator Tim Beck.
Lee credits Lea with being able to make that pivot, and now in some ways the pressure is back on her to take full advantage of this moment in the spotlight.
Because the reality at Vanderbilt is that because of this success, some bills are coming due.
Lea, who said building a football operations center is his top priority, will undoubtedly be targeted by other schools. Next year, Pavia’s college career will be over and Vanderbilt’s NIL payroll will be put to the test in a different way. While being good in every major sport is an aspiration for every athletic department, it’s a huge challenge given the revenue-sharing setup where individual schools have to decide how to allocate their $21 million among sports and athletes.
“The more we recognize what the top end of the league and country are doing in terms of resourcing rosters and coaching staffs, the closer we get to that, the further we can take this thing,” Lea said. “We don’t need to be moneyball around here. We need to be leveraging the moment and the opportunity.”
Can Vanderbilt do that with donors and local businesses to remain competitive in NIL, or does the athletic department get stretched thin trying to be as broadly successful as Diermeier expects?
“To be successful you need both [NIL and revenue share], and going into next year in men’s basketball we’re going to be behind in both,” Byington said. “Our revenue share has got to go up, or our off-court NIL has got to go way up or we’re not going to be able to maintain success. Everybody here knows that and everybody’s trying to put together a plan to come up with it.”
It's a different kind of challenge for Vanderbilt, but also a welcome one in some sense. Because while money of course helped spark the transformation, the campus-wide culture shift that gave space for success to take root is both impossible to put a price tag on and will outlast those who planted the seeds, much less whatever happens in Tuscaloosa on Saturday.
“This has forever been such a siloed operation, and you just don’t meet those barriers anymore,” Lea said. “It’s imperfect like all things are imperfect, but man is it better.”
Category: General Sports
