Vanderbilt Football Knows It Has to be Better Defensively. Clark Lea Hopes his Team Responds to the Challenge

NASHVILLE — Vanderbilt football head coach Clark Lea got introspective at his weekly Tuesday press conference when he was asked about his defense.

The Commodores feel like they have not played a complete four-quarter yet through three weeks. That was evidenced especially on defense in Vanderbilt’s win over NC State. The Commodores gave up 446 yards of total offense and led up a few chunk plays that the team sees as unacceptable to give up.

This week, Vanderbilt heads to Auburn for its first game on its SEC schedule. It is a game that is quite frankly another benchmark as to where the Commodores are at and which direction their season could go over the next two months.

Perhaps it is fortunate, but Vanderbilt’s defense is going to face a similar challenge that it did against NC State. Like NC State quarterback CJ Bailey, Vanderbilt will play against Auburn quarterback Byrum Brown. Brown is another dual-threat quarterback that can beat teams with his arm and with his legs, just as Bailey was able to against Vanderbilt Saturday.

But this week, Lea has a challenge to his defense that he is hoping will show up on the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

“My challenge to the defense is no explosive touchdowns this week. And let’s see how many field goals we can force in situations where the ball gets down in tight spaces. That becomes a winning formula for us,” Lea said.

The result of Lea’s challenge is more than likely a direct result of what happened defensively against NC State. Lea went through three plays that he wants to eliminate from happening again this season.

The first occurred on NC State’s first possession of the game. On a third down and two yards to go, NC State backup quarterback Will Wilson took a quarterback keeper and was briefly met by Vanderbilt’s defensive line at the line of scrimmage. But Wilson was able to escape and go out the back door for a 38-yard rushing touchdown, where there were almost no Vanderbilt defenders to be found.

That play in particular irked Lea as a defensive guy. Not only did he obviously not like the result of the play, but what he disliked even more was how his defense was set up. To him, it was a sloppy and an inexcusable error that had Vanderbilt playing catch up from the start.

“I look at it and say it’s a really good play by them, but why are we in this personnel grouping with front leverage this way and with a blitz called that’s not being run. I mean, there’s just a lot of sloppiness there. And to be honest with you, I trust structure. When I see a lack of structure, that makes me anxious,” Lea said. “We’ve got to fix it. Good teams will expose you that way when you have an issue.”

On another play, Bailey completed a pass on a post route to one of his receivers. It was a play where the tight end wheeled up to the sideline. There, Vanderbilt safety CJ Heard was beaten so cornerback Martel Hight tried to salvage Heard by coming over to help. As a result, though, it left the NC State receiver on the post route open for another explosive play.

Lea compared it to last season’s game at Tennessee, where Vanderbilt’s defense was caught off guard with their eyes to the sidelines and ended up getting beat by a Tennessee receiver down the sideline.

Vanderbilt knows to eliminate those plays from happening again it has to communicate better and develop more chemistry. But Lea also believes the solution is to get back to the standard his defense has for itself and play a way it can be proud of.

“The adjustments in those situations are like ‘Hey, let’s play our football. And it’s not going to eliminate every big play, but you’re going to contest these plays. You’re going to make them less open and less probable,” Lea said. “We say in our program that yards don’t matter, points do. Those two are most glaring to me.”

To expect to shut down every potential explosive play would be a ridiculous one to set. But Vanderbilt does know that as it goes through the SEC gauntlet it needs to eliminate enough big plays to where it will help Vanderbilt on the scoreboard and the win column.

“Those three [plays], if I could erase, then I think what we’re going to see is point limitation from our defense and maybe a couple of those become field goal attempts,” Lea said. “I don’t want to lose any of the aggressiveness that we’ve created and the way we pressure. We’ve got to be responsible with it and we’ve got to make sure we’re playing our defense.”

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