2026 Doesn't Have To Be A Foundational Year For Vanderbilt Football
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NASHVILLE—Think about it for a second.
It’s September of 2027. Jared Curtis has a year of starting under his belt and is poised to step into stardom. Clark Lea takes advantage of five-for-five legislation with a loaded core group headlined by Junior Sherrill, Sedrick Alexander, Bryan Longwell and Martel Hight. The multi-year investments that Vanderbilt made in the 2026 portal cycle are paying off. Vanderbilt is firmly in its competitive window.
Think about the mature road wins that are about to come, the interceptions that will be avoided despite being thrown the year prior, the high-dollar transfer additions that promise to impact winning and plug holes immediately. Think about the meaningful November football and run that Vanderbilt will be set to make that will indicate that its 10-win 2025 season wasn’t a fluke. Think about Curtis putting on a show that leads to belief in him as a Heisman Trophy candidate in 2028.
Now, snap out of it.
Lea thought that through when he built this roster, but he doesn’t want to hear it right now. He knows he lost his two best players and doesn’t have a path to easily replace them in 2026, but he says he isn’t rebuilding. As far as his public messaging goes, that thought hasn’t crossed his mind.
“I didn’t come to Vanderbilt for a 10-win season,” Lea said at the SEC’s spring meetings. “I came to win a national championship. I know we have ground to cover to do that.”
Lea declared at SEC Media Day that his program is as “in focus” as it’s been since his arrival and that its infrastructure under him has never been stronger. Lea has been fighting the narrative that his program’s success is more to do with Diego Pavia’s stardom than its evolution all offseason, and he’s sick of it. Now, he’s finally got a chance to prove the narrative’s inaccuracy.
Vanderbilt opens Saturday against Austin Peay and is viewing it as its first opportunity to prove itself. It has its focus set on an ongoing quarterback competition that still hasn’t led to Curtis taking the job full time. It has a number of veterans that have given the program all they’ve had since they arrived and won’t be around in 2027.
There’s still a season to play and an offseason to go through before Vanderbilt football is at the point that it very realistically could be in a year, and Lea isn’t diminishing this team’s possibilities. This Vanderbilt team still hasn’t lost a game. This Vanderbilt team is just getting started. Pavia is gone, but Vanderbilt’s competitive window could be open right now.
This looks like a foundational year that teaches the core of the next great Vanderbilt team how to win in the SEC, tells it if it has its quarterback of the future on the roster and shows Lea what he has to go out and get in the portal on the surface. But, Lea and company are more likely to pin an image of that sentence on the whiteboards in the McGugin Center than internalize it. They believe they may have his best all around team, even without the stars that his last one had.
All things considered, a 8-4 or 7-5 season would be all but a resounding success for Vanderbilt externally, but Lea would have mixed feelings on that—at best. Being happy with 8-4 or 7-5 would go against every theme of Lea’s offseason messaging.
“This group has inherited something that previous teams did not: a Vanderbilt football program that expects to win,” Lea said at SEC Media Day. “With that inheritance comes standard over excuses, responsibility over entitlement, commitment over convenience.”
In this case, expecting to win isn’t expecting to merely play in a bowl game or expecting to lay the foundation for a breakout year. It’s pushing for the same things that Vanderbilt football pushed for a year ago and fell short of: the College Football Playoff and the national championship. Getting there requires winning almost every game. It requires almost everything going right late in games. It requires some rare injury luck.
The core of this Vanderbilt team learned that a year ago. Yet, they still double down that winning big is the expectation in 2026.
That’s easier said than done. Vanderbilt will have to replace elite quarterback play in the aggregate with a first-time starting quarterback. It will have to replace its most explosive receiver without any clear replacement. Its defense will inevitably have pressure on it to all but shut down opposing offenses. Even if those things happen, a playoff berth still sounds like a long shot. Its win total sits at 5.5, per Covers.
There’s the bad news for this Vanderbilt team. The good news? It has a clean slate and a chip on its shoulder because of external skepticism. It's also one of the most experienced power-five teams in the country. Logic would indicate that Vanderbilt is better positioned to make the College Football Playoff in 2027 and 2028 than it is in 2026, but there’s no reason that it can’t do that now. This Vanderbilt team controls its own destiny. It’s got all its chips in on 2026 and doesn’t have to wait a year to be elite.
It can start doing that right now.
“There's a lot of hope around us in the community around us around what we can accomplish,” Lea told Vandy on SI in the spring. “These guys are really hungry to show that the success is gonna be sustained, and that the program is gonna move forward.”
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Joey Dwyer is the lead writer on Vanderbilt Commodores On SI. He found his first love in college sports at nearby Lipscomb University and decided to make a career of telling its best stories. He got his start doing a Notre Dame basketball podcast from his basement as a 14-year-old during COVID and has since aimed to make that 14-year-old proud. Dwyer has covered Vanderbilt sports for three years and previously worked for 247 Sports and Rivals. He contributes to Seth Davis' Hoops HQ, Basket Under Review and Mainstreet Nashville.
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