Injuries may have derailed this season before it even starts, but the future is promising under Shea Ralph.

Got to meet him last night at the Cheatham County Sports Hall Of Fame Induction. @Chris Lee such a great joy to meet him in person after the great pod casts . He was inducted last night . Told him to keep up the great work …..very informative .

First off, this guy sucks as an OC.

Second, he is going all in on getting Sarah Fuller an extra point chance and that appears to be secondary to actually winning the football game.

I didn't think we should retain this clown at all before, but now I think I can safely say that no matter who we hire, the first person officially let go should be Todd Fitch.

We need to rid ourselves of losers.

Early lines are always the most off, but interesting nonetheless.

he podcast is presented by Dr. Jody Jones, DDS.

The guest line is presented by Michael Kendrick of The Kendrick Group. Michael is a local carpenter and a lifelong Vandy fan. He builds bookshelves, cabinets, picture frames, furniture and made-to-order items, including a display case for my prized Dale Murphy jersey. I have seen Michael’s work and he’s a true craftsman. If you’re in the market for custom woodwork, give Michael a call at 615.830.9458.

Today’s mailbag is sponsored by Sutherland & Belk, a family owned injury law firm. If you or a loved one has been hurt in an accident, give Taylor or Russell a call at 615-846-6200 to see what your rights are and if they can help.

I'm doing this at 10 Monday morning

The U is falling on hard times. After an embarrassing home loss to FSU last night before a sellout crowd, this was noted on Twitter.

”Mario Cristobal should be the next FEMA director,’’ an FSU fan tweeted. “Man single-handedly evacuated 65,000 ppl in less than 3 hours.’’

I don’t like picking on people, Cristobal included, but this is priceless.

31-14 South Carolina. Most of it on Vanderbilt being Vanderbilt against South Carolina.

Im going to watch a real football game, Bama and LSU.

Clark has a lot of work to do, and recruiting after back to back 0-8 SEC seasons is going to be very difficult.

Cmon Stack, make us forget about football, please.

Driving home with my dad and we discussed this. Long post but just getting all my comments out there

What is the answer? How do you fix Vandy football? Is there an answer? Is it really as simple as hiring the right coach? Heck, see Kansas and UT and Oregon and TCU.. they hit HR in the coaching hires.

But we have Lea right now and I doubt he gets fired any time soon. So, How do you recruit kids here. What is the sell? Heading in to next year we will have a 29 game conference losing streak. TWENTY NINE STRAIGHT CONFERENCE LOSSES

and don't give me the 4 years for 40 pitch. This is SEC football. HS Kids that come to the SEC want to win and make the NFL. They can get the education that they want (and a decent one, this isn't an education knock on any school) at any SEC school.
How do you get coaches to want to come here? How do you get fans to the games? Students? (answer there is just win).

The only sell I can think of for a kid is playing time. Can you imagine taking a visit to Vandy and then being at Bama/LSU/UGA/UT the next week? How would ANYONE ever pick Vandy? and I know we will never recruit vs those teams but heck, make it UK/USC/Mizzou/etc.

"Hey man, yeah we've lost 26 straight P5 games but you can help turn it around" - yeah, hard pass.

I don't know the answer. If I am being truthful and honest, there is no answer. We are what we are. Take away 3 seasons in my lifetime (35 years), and Vandy football is what Vandy football is. I don't see any path that gets us to making bowl games on a consistent basis. May be harsh but, I don't see it

Last comment - we will not win an SEC game this year. Clark Lea will be 0-16 in SEC games going in to year 3. What do you do as an AD when you fired a previous coach for Literally doing the same thing and not winning a conference game? What team can we beat next year? Maybe Mizzou at home?

It's amazing anyone is still a fan of this program. Apathy is a program death penalty and the apathy around this football team is at an all time high.

Here are some notable expected visitors coming in for the South Carolina game tomorrow...

Commits:

Ethan Crisp
London Humphreys
Maureice Sherrill

2023 Targets:

Randon Fontennette, S, Brazosport (Tex.) - Just de-committed from Utah. Took a summer official to Vanderbilt and will be back in Nashville. He recently visited TCU and that is the perceived leader at the moment. Will Vandy change the momentum this weekend? We'll see.

2024 Targets:

Edwin Spillman, LB, Lipscomb Academy (Tenn.) - Will probably end up committing to Tennessee since his brother is committed there. Regardless, he'll be back on campus

Kaleb Beasley, CB, Lipscomb Academy (Tenn.) - Recent Tennessee commit.

Brandon Heyward, WR, Oak Ridge (Tenn.) - Recently put Vanderbilt among his Top 8

Brandon Nicholson, CB, MUS (Tenn.) - Visited Vanderbilt back in July. Also picked up recent offers from Tennessee and Florida State. Believe Vanderbilt has a really good shot here

Markeis Barrett, ATH, Webb School of Knox (Tenn.) - Has visited Vanderbilt once already for a game in September and returned for a visit during his fall break in October. Commodores making a big push.

Looks like AJ has his second concussion in as many games. Hope that’s not the case as we may have a Patton Robinette situation.

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Luke Wyatt was affiliated with Vanderbilt football for over 40 years and saw what worked and what didn't. With that, here's an hour of background to help make sense of how Vanderbilt arrived at another long SEC losing streak, and how the Commodores have escaped similar streaks before and gone on to some level of success afterwards. Also, are Vanderbilt's facilities commitments good enough? Luke gives his opinion on that also, as well as some talk about the loss to Missouri.

With all of the self-pity and ranting, I mean to be honest who didn't expect this? I think most when they took their Vandy-colored glasses off (I know some are unremovable for a few) knew this was exactly how these two seasons would do.

2-3 wins each. We've said it over and over. Mason brought in incredibly non-competitive SEC level talent and left a ridiculously disorganized program. So sure we can pick one program a year, Kansas or whatever and say "why didn't we do that." but the odds were exactly as they are playing out. 2 years of complete SEC losing. And talent makes coaches look good. Talent makes coaches look bad. That's 101. Our talent in not SEC.

Lea bores me incredibly. I think many on here way overrate his recruiting thus far by a good deal.. But he is organized, he is throrough, and he wants to win more than any single person on this board times 100x. He is playing who he thinks we can win with and he knows a lot more about coaching than you.

Next year has always been, as I've been yammering about since his hire, the real test. We need 4-5 wins next year and an SEC win AND we need to build on that momentum to bring in a top 30 recruiting class. We need the AD to shut up about plans and see actual facilities. Until then we can wallow all we want about how much we such, we've sucked since Franklin, but it's hard to really say we suck because our coach sucks -- and this comes from one of the biggest critics of him when we hired him.

This is the place for pre-, in- and post-game thoughts.

The questions and concerns I see are the following:

1. No matter the DC this is Lea’s defense. They are running what he wants them to run
   1. There has been little improvement in tackling SEC opponents for two years now.
   2. All layers of the defense- DL, Lb’s and secondary still take bad angles and/or lose leverage consistently game over game.
   3. Most concerning is the veteran players keep having this happen to them - Mahoney, Barr, Orji, veterans in the secondary, etc. Even Kane Patterson is doing this now when I did not see that happen at Clemson when he played.
2. QB play
   1. This is a quandary
   2. Swann is probably gone for the year due to concussions
   3. The play calling with Wright is all over the board. If he is a runner, put him in better position to make plays with the read option. There are too many times, the play design does not leverage his running ability to keep the defense guessing. Last night several times there was no faking after a hand off and the back side paid no attention to his ability to run
   4. There are other play designs with bootleg/run/pass option that he could run but see no design for them.
   5. What about Seals? Is he washed up? Has VU written him off? That is a mystery. Hell Hugh Freeze played his 3rd string QB yesterday for Liberty and beat Arkansas at their place.
3. Glad Swann seemed to look at other receivers after his first pass was to a double covered Shepperd. But why wait so long when after the Bama, UGA AND Ole Miss games they were shutting Shepperd down? Why hasn’t Lynch designed more packages to the the TE’s and other receivers involved?
   
   All in all, this staff seems really stodgy in not finding more creative designs offensively and defensively after scouting opponents to put them in better positions. Maybe that is a reflection of Lea as a personality and the Corbin philosophy of coaching that gimmicks do not work. However, at some point you know enough about your personnel and the opponent to be crafty and make some good play designs. Not to bring up an old record, but Franklin always had this edge. Watson Brown had that edge as an OC at Vandy. Stallings had his great play designs. If you watched Hugh Freeze call plays yesterday he was very creative with his calls and play designs to get first downs playing without his top running back and with his 3rd string QB
4. Finally, I want Lea to be the guy. He is a solid guy and well intentioned. Believe he feels worse than anyone about this. So far, he has not really shown he has the ability to execute better with what he has. That is concerning.
5. He needs to start showing improvements in these areas and not use the excuse he needs better players. He has to steal some games he should not have won.
   
   
   
   
   

He should have been suspended from yesterday's game... at a minimum.

I’m on a family vaca in Prague, Czech Republic. I of course stayed up through the game listening on my iPhone from 12:30am to 3:30. After an hour of sleep and a final morning run in town I pack my bags and join my parents for breakfast in our hotel. As I look to rinse all memory of the game away and tell my folks about how CCL just doesn’t look like the guy to get it done at Vandy I notice another family staring at me. Turns out they’re Gamecock fans from Augusta visiting their kid who’s in school in Vienna. But they really love visiting Nashville and hope we pull it together.🤮

nm

I have read some threads, and I hear the hurt and anger in your posts.

I have to admit that I never watched a down. I haven’t this whole year. I’ve said it so many times: the outcome is the same whether you watch or not. Mayo is not a winner. He never will be.

I watched Baylor go to OU and win. I watched part of the glorious beat down of the vols. I had dinner with my family. I watched the end of a tremendous game in Baton Rouge. Why in the world would anyone want to see the pitiful excuse for football that VU plays?

Great coaches make the game look easy. Mayo and company made football look like the most difficult thing ever. That’s why I quit watching last year after about game 4. I didn’t watch the last two years of Mason, so it was easy. Fire the whole staff, but you have the same guy hiring the new staff. He is going to be here doing his best, which is completely sub par. He will be here for a few more years. Irreparable damage will be done to the football program. Just adjust your expectations. Voice your displeasure the only way you can: don’t do to games or listen or watch.

Your Saturdays will be so much better. It’s way better than all the anger and hurt I am seeing. Embrace apathy when it comes to VU football. We have hoops to watch and baseball before you know it. Hang in there!

8-0, #1 ranking, just went bye-bye..

Nothing sucks like a big orange!

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Opening statement
Disappointed in the results
It came down to turnovers and tackling
He respected the way they competed and stayed in the fight
He didn’t like the post-snap stuff that led to penalties in the first half, they got better at that
Resilient bunch of guys who care about each other
Shout-out to Bradley Ashmore, who’s scheduled for surgery on Monday but played the entire game knowing that coming in. That’s a bright spot on a disappointing day.

It didn’t seem like there was a huge talent differential, what options are left?
SC made more plays than they made
They broke tackles on the perimeter, for example
They came out of the Missouri game and created some design elements that helped them and they were proud of that
They need to keep improving; tackling is about leverage and eye discipline and other things (didn’t catch it all)
They lost the edge on that third-down snap that went for a TD
They won’t throw their hands up, they’ll keep at it
Tonight they weren’t good enough but they’re not far off

Asked about Dan Jackson being on the sideline, talk about that decision
He doesn’t want to answer that question for Dan Jackson in terms of backing Kanye West’s comments
Dan Jackson made a mistake, he’s deeply disappointed by that
They want an environment where they have conversations about that
He sat down with Dan as soon as he caught wind of this
Dan expressed in that meeting, as he did in that statement, that he regretted it as he did in his statement
They reject hate speech and anti-semitism and value diversity
He would never want anything out of this program to create an impression that puts anybody at risk
At this point they have no further comment

A lot of people are pissed off about Dan Jackson, don’t they deserve the full story?

Will Dan Jackson talk?
Right now it’s about the game, he’s not shutting the door about Dan Jackson
They’ll leave time another time

Why was Dan allowed to coach?
That’s not speaking about the game, right now they’re not going to talk about that?

From a football perspective, how can they coach games when he believes all the stuff KW believes
I understand the question, we don’t discuss personnel matters publicly

Why was it so chippy with post-play penalties and such
They’re carrying around frustration and they have to be above that
Nothing good happens towards the outcome after the whistle
Second half they settled in and played a style and demeanor that more reflected what they want to be
They’ll come back to that on film on Monday
They’ll fight for the result they want, that’ll happen between the

Is AJ Swann okay?
He wasn’t able to return

No status update
They’ll hope for his help

If not Wright has to be ready to go

Nick Rinaldi played, what contributed to that?
He has contributed through the season on ST
He’s moved through the season, dealing with injury, they’re banged up, they believe in Nick, they want him to keep his redshirt

On the run game, did they see something on film that worked?
They like their RBs, they were able to create space

Their front did a good job, their backs created some explosive plays
They were also patient
This has to be a feature of their offense

Chris, I would like to hear what the recruits thought about our play last night. Seems a shame to bring recruits to games like this where we look like total shitE!

Especially the secondary.

A messed up trick play that shouldn't have gone anywhere, goes for a TD.

Fire this clown DC

Why didn’t we schedule an easy win against as bad FCS opponent simply to A) get another win to build confidence and B) to give our younger players more reps. We always knew we weren’t going to a bowl game, so why not take advantage of the rules in place to create an advantage for your program? It doesn’t appear that we did anything that made a material difference with our bye weeks this year to gain an advantage on our next opponent anyway, so we may as well have gotten another win for the program and developed the team.

We have 2 bye weeks next year too, but I’m not sure adding a game is an option like it was this season since we don’t travel to Hawaii next year.