Vanderbilt Football Knows Its Place and It Says It's Not Where Everyone Else Thinks

Nashville—Clark Lea has gone out of his way over the years to drown out external noise and the public opinion surrounding his program, but through all the media hits and talking around town he can’t help but notice the dialogue surrounding his team.

From what he’s heard, Lea has heard a national sentiment that his Vanderbilt program should “know its place” within the landscape of the country and the SEC.That confining place has often promoted the same old Vanderbilt narrative and has repeatedly seen Vanderbilt finish last or near it in the SEC.

“I think people hang on to the past, they want to judge you for the past,” Lea said. “They want Vanderbilt to play this certain specific role in the world, and we reject that. We talk about winning here and they tell us to be quiet, retreat to our corner. We're just not gonna do that. I want a team that's assertive and playing forward and leading, aggressively, and you can't show up on Saturday and create that. That is something that has to be tangible 365 days a year.”

After Vanderbilt’s 7-6 season in 2024, it’s walked and talked with a confidence that’s unfamiliar to those who have been around it over the years. It no longer thinks of itself as a program that’s going to be pushed around like it has in its past.

Lea cautions Vanderbilt’s players against acting as if they’re entitled to anything because of what they’ve done and the expectations that they have. He wants them to think bigger than those outside of his program do, though. They certainly haven’t been rattled by the box that they’ve been placed in externally.

“I don't want people to think that with one season it’s one and done for us,” Vanderbilt running back Sedrick Alexander said. “I think we're gonna change what people think. I think that it's gonna be continuous wins each and every year from now on. And I think that Vanderbilt is not one of those low class teams that everybody expects us to be. We're really a good team and we're going to show it this year.”

In the context of Vanderbilt football, the term “really good” has often been a subjective term. At times it’s meant showing enough progress to provide some hope that ultimately fizzles out. Sometimes it’s bowl eligibility. Sometimes it's a few fun upset wins like Vanderbilt had last season.

Who knows how it ends for this 2025 Vanderbilt team, but it’s making it clear that there’s a different definition of Alexander’s adjectives around this program nowadays.

This group doesn’t want anything to be left up for interpretation or anything to be subjective about it. It’s got a clear goal. That goal is unfamiliar to most that have been a part of its program, but this group believes it has the horses to do something that this program hasn’t done. Maybe it sounds crazy, but this group of chip on the shoulder guys just won’t stop saying it.

“We have a national championship to win,” Vanderbilt receiver Richie Hoskins said. “We really don't care what the externals say. A lot of people said ‘7-6, that's a great season’ but at the end of the day it kind of was a stepping stone, but it was not the standard.”

This Vanderbilt team has to know that it sounds odd when it speaks the way it does to people who have never heard it speak that way. Hoskins glosses over Vanderbilt’s turnaround from a 2-10 bottomfeeder in 2023 to a 7-6 team that won a bowl game in 2024, but he’s right.

Those who have seen Vanderbilt teams run on the field and consistently get blown out against the teams that had national title aspirations over the years likely have a hard time getting on Hoskins’ level mentally, but Vanderbilt is okay with that. 7-6 is good for Vanderbilt, but for other programs that gets the coach fired. Vanderbilt has often used the challenges that come along with its program as excuses or validation for poor performance. It’s no longer doing that and it’s jarring.

For the first time in a long time, Vanderbilt is aiming at the same target everyone else is. It doesn’t care if you’re okay with that or not.

“We don't pay a lot of attention to those external opinions,” Lea said. “ I don't ever want to be a part of something that plays small. I don't ever be a part of something that pails to external opinion, or that somehow feels like we should be ashamed of the past. This is about building something that's new, vibrant and different, and that takes vision, that takes language. It takes alignment, and it takes time. I never, ever want to be a part of something that was okay with somehow just staying in line and taking a place. We're going to try to define what we want and go after it with everything we have.”