No More Politician Hat For Clark Lea, Time To Hone In On The Mission Again
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NASHVILLE—-It was almost as if someone was up at the podium in Vanderbilt football’s team room doing a historically inaccurate impression of Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea on Monday and Wednesday afternoon.
The guy up there for those two press conferences was a lobbyist of sorts who often bridged his answers to his agenda to promoting his team’s College Football Playoff chances. Lea listed off metrics, showed some fire when addressing the committee’s process and appeared to be on the podium with the sole purpose of doing everything he could do to get his team into the 12-team playoff field.
Sunday, Lea’s efforts fell short as his team finished as the No. 14 team in the poll and accepted a bid to the ReliaQuest Bowl at Raymond James Stadium. As Lea addressed the meda on Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t anger or a resounding message of displeasure that was a precursor to his words. As if the actor had swapped places with Lea and allowed him to get back to the podium, he talked like himself again on Sunday.
It appears as if Lea still believes his team’s 10-2 record and rolodex of conference wins was enough to get it over the hump, but he reverted back to his old objective habits rather than pushing any type of narrative on Sunday.
“I felt like a politician last week,” Lea said. “I was pounding the pavement for the team and that's because I believe in this team and my job is to best position them. But so much of that kind of cuts against what I actually believe in, which is that you have to seize your opportunities to prove yourself. And it was clear that we didn't do enough to get across the line.”
Lea’s team is the first 10-2 SEC team to be left out of the field since the inception of the 12-team playoff prior to last season. The Vanderbilt coach expressed frustration last week in regard to what he believed to be constantly-changing criteria that the committee was selecting the field off of.
The Commodores were ultimately done in by their two losses to Texas and Alabama as well as their wins against Tennessee, South Carolina and LSU aging poorly down the stretch. Vanderbilt ended the season with zero wins over ranked opponents. Vanderbilt still believes that it was deserving of a chance to play for the national championship, though.
Lea wasn’t fiery or beating on any tables on Sunday, but he had one final point to make in regard to the College Football Playoff and its format. His program has often been unafraid to push for legislation or loopholes in terms of player eligibility, it followed its past tendencies up with a push for an extra game to audition for the committee. Now it’s hoping for a solution to what it feels is the problem that it just encountered.
“To work towards a system that puts the 12 best or 16 best, hopefully teams, in at the finish. I think is really important,” Lea said. “You start to try to think about ways automatic bids, and how do we give room for, again, those Cinderella stories that we all love so much and yet you look up and you say ‘hey, did we really do the best we could to get [the best] 12 in? And that's not about the committee. That's about the system, it's how we designed the system. So I think we'd all agree that with where the game has gone, there's been a separation in the way the game is played. And, you know, it probably leaves a little less room for some of those group of five Cinderella stories.”
Vanderbilt would’ve been a Cinderella story in its own way had it been included in the field. The Commodores describe themselves as a group of “misfits” and have become one of America’s most prominent “chip on the shoulder” programs as a result of its downtrodden history and its history of individual players being underrecruited.
Prior to the selection show, Lea and Vanderbilt athletic director Candice Storey Lee both promoted the idea that Vanderbilt’s rèsumè wasn’t being evaluated solely based off of its merit, but with the bias that comes with the past of the program mixed in. It’s one of a laundry list of gripes that the spokespeople of this program have with the committee. All of those complaints appear to have dissipated, though. Vanderbilt never considered an opt-out like multiple other bubble playoff teams did, Lea says, it's all in on the final opportunity it has together.
Lea has moved on, it seems. Time to get back to work. Time to take the marketing hat off.
“What an opportunity and what a blessing and how grateful we are to have this chance to represent our conference against the Big Ten to have one final climb as a team,” Lea said of the ReliaQuest Bowl. “We're going to be together and have fun. We're to make sure we keep our mission focused. And we want to go down and play our best game of the year on New Year's Eve.”
_(1)-b3e453dfe426b2dd4b83a12540ebdb37.jpeg "Joey Dwyer")
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, Southeastern 16 and Mainstreet Nashville.
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