Vanderbilt Football is Quickly Becoming Nashville's Team; Column

NASHVILLE—The eerie music overtakes the screen, Ray Kinsella wades through the corn and ruffles each stalk as he stares out at the Iowa sunset while looking around sharply as to pinpoint the origin of a mysterious whisper. “If you build it, he will come,” it says. Over 35-plus years of word of mouth, the phrase has often morphed into a misconstrued “if you build it, they will come.”

It’s not a line that Clark Lea has ever quoted, but it’s one that he could feasibly say he lived by without causing anyone to bat an eye. The Vanderbilt head coach inherited this thing at its lowest–after an 0-9 disaster of a 2020 season–and had to build it from the ground up. Lea always appeared to believe he could, but admits that approaching the build was often reminiscent of standing at the bottom of a mountain and looking up at its peak.

The product on the field in the infancy stages of Lea’s build was drastically below the standard that he’d set for this program–and the rest of the SEC, for that matter–so was the crowd. It was a mess of apathy, jadedness and unbelief that often manifested itself in half-empty stadiums or ones that were vacation homes for SEC fanbases looking to make a trip of their team’s supposed easy win.

It’s going to take significantly more consistent production than the two-consecutive bowl-eligible seasons and waves of buzz that Lea’s program has generated to remove the trend surrounding the bleachers at FirstBank Stadium–as evidenced by the heavy LSU contingent in the building on Saturday–but it appears as if the tides are turning.

At the very least, Lea’s program–which is 6-1 for the first time since 1950 after its Saturday win over No. 10 LSU–is piquing the interest of some of the Nashville A-listers that it’s so often marketed its ability to attract, but has so rarely attracted.

“It’s cool to support a team that’s winning,” Two-time Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter Noah Kahan told Vandy on SI. “Growing up we had Dartmouth College football and, bless their hearts, they were never that good.”

The difference in days like Saturday in which those like Kahan–who told Vandy on SI that Saturday was his first Vanderbilt game in his five games as a Nashville resident–attended and the four seasons in which they opted to stay home isn’t all that difficult to interpret. This isn’t all that reminiscent of Dartmouth College and this isn’t the same old Vanderbilt, either.

This iteration of Vanderbilt football is a winner. Plain and simple. It has winning goals. It walks around as if it expects to win. As ESPN’s Rece Davis said before Vanderbilt’s matchup with No. 10 Alabama, everyone loves an underdog. The general public’s gravitation towards the lovable loser capable of pulling off an upset here or there pales in comparison to the pull of a team that is a contender to be in the College Football Playoff when the field is set.

Lea’s team truly believes it’s in the national title race. Some believe it when it says that. Others laugh at it and say it’s delusional. Clearly something is working, though.

By the time Vanderbilt kicked off against Brian Kelly’s LSU team, Kahan, star comedian Theo Von, Cleveland Cavaliers’ stars Darius Garland and Donovan Mitchell as well as former Vanderbilt and current Chicago Cubs’ shortstop Dansby Swanson were all in the building. It was perhaps the most star-studded FirstBank Stadium has ever been on a Vanderbilt gameday.

“It’s just exciting to see a team play with swagger and confidence and really represent the university in such an incredible way,” Swanson said in a conversation with Vandy on SI from FirstBank Stadium’s south end zone on Saturday. “You can’t really ask for anything more than what Clark and his staff have done and just what this team embodies, the toughness, swagger, commitment to being a winning program.”

Swanson says he’s Vanderbilt “through and through” and is the outlier among the group of celebrities in the building on Saturday, most of which–including Von–admit they’ve only been around through the ups of Lea’s build rather than the downs. Former Vanderbilt quarterback Jay Cutler is among those who denounced Vanderbilt’s program and said he wanted his sons to grow up watching a better example of football than what his former program could provide.

Cutler criticized the on-field product that Lea’s program put on the field early in his tenure as well as the construction that failed to dignify the efforts that Lea’s players and staff put in. But as Cutler stood behind the end zone and looked up at Vanderbilt’s south end zone prior to the Commodores matchup with Georgia State, it was completed in a way that appeared to make things more appealing for him.

“They did it right,” Cutler said before going on to rave about Vanderbilt’s magnetic quarterback Diego Pavia who he says is “fun to watch.” Pavia–who has seen his Heisman Trophy odds increase since a standout performance in Saturday’s 31-24 win over LSU–is as much to credit in this program’s public relations renaissance as anyone as a result of his polarizing talk, identity as college football’s most prominent underdog and ability to take over a game.

The Vanderbilt quarterback is a marketing dream and college football’s greatest enigma. He’s often expressed a desire for this program to become Nashville’s team rather than his rivals out east or a multitude of other landmark SEC programs. When the Vanderbilt quarterback embraces the city and goes downtown, he wants to see Vanderbilt flags rather than those like his rivals, as well.

Between his play and words, Pavia has been the most effective marketer in this program’s history. Von isn’t far behind, though. The comedian and podcaster hasn’t quite dropped his affinity for other SEC schools, but has developed a friendship with Pavia as well as a significant chunk of the rest of Vanderbilt's roster that’s led him to be in the building for six of Vanderbilt’s seven games–including three road games.

Von was Vanderbilt’s College Gameday representative in Tuscaloosa. He made Instagram posts from Vanderbilt’s fall camp practices and is a fixture at its McGugin Center. He dumped Gatorade on Lea after Vanderbilt’s win over No. 1 Alabama. Bluntly, he was the first to make supporting this Vanderbilt program cool.

“It’s pretty fascinating to me,” Von told Vandy on SI. “It’s been a gift to me to be around young guys that have a lot of energy and s***. It gives me energy. Clark I feel like is a good role model. I love some of the talks he gives. I love the accountability they have in practice where guys can speak up. It’s all a gift. I feel like being around with good energy is always a gift.”

Who knows if it’s related to Von or just a result of Pavia and this program finding a way to become a consistent winner, but it appears to be far closer to becoming Nashville’s team than it’s ever been before.

Perhaps the stars coming out for this program on Saturday wasn’t the last instance it’ll see of that.

“It's always been the vision that Saturday nights can start here on the West End,” Lea said. “I'm grateful for the community that's out there that's still deciding whether or not they're going to become fans. I'm grateful for them to show up, and I look forward to more of those and seeing what kind of environment we can create. And I know that there's more for us out there, and I also know that this team can do things that become really fun and exciting.”