With football as focus, Vanderbilt primed to again take down Alabama

The Vanderbilt football team is no longer the easy opponent it once was in the SEC.
Alabama players and coaches have stated they are not overlooking Vanderbilt after last season’s upset.
Quarterback Diego Pavia has emerged as a key player, elevating the team’s performance.

Here we go again. Football isn’t the story, excuses are. 

It started with Alabama players, in lockstep after last week’s thrilling win at Georgia, promising they’ve learned from last season.

“I think I can speak for everyone when I say we’re not overlooking Vanderbilt,” said Tide offensive tackle Kadyn Proctor.  

Then there was Crimson Tide coach Kalen DeBoer, who was asked right out of the gate at his weekly press conference about “not taking Vanderbilt seriously” in last season’s historic upset.

“I’m not going to argue against that,” DeBoer said.

Just stop it.  

This isn’t the same Vanderbilt of years past, the SEC’s annual tomato can stumbling and staggering through college football’s best conference with 40-point losses. 

This isn’t the same Vanderbilt, the program that fit better in the Ivy League than the conference that annually sends more players to the NFL than any other in college football.

This is a legit SEC team that already passed its first major test of the season last month, beating South Carolina – the rising College Football Playoff darling of the offseason – by 24 points on the road.

It’s not just dismissive that Alabama (or any other team) says they’re “not overlooking” Vanderbilt, it’s insulting. 

Vandy hung 40 last year on an Alabama defense full of future NFL players. Vandy knocked out South Carolina star quarterback LaNorris Sellers in September, bludgeoning a hot SEC program and making it look wildly outmanned.  

Vanderbilt has won 12 of its last 18 games, and among those six losses, was a three-point gut-punch it gave away to Texas — which advanced to the CFP semifinals last season and played Ohio State better than any other team in the playoff.

So yeah, Alabama – or anyone else – isn’t overlooking anything. It’s no different than any other team on the SEC schedule.

The Commodores are unbeaten, and beating teams by an average of 32 points. They have one of the best players in college football (QB Diego Pavia), and they’re playing with a level of confidence never seen in more than a century of football on the West End.

You think this team is intimidated by Alabama, or the fact that Tide players and coaches say, this time, really, they’re not overlooking Vanderbilt? Please, enough of this nonsense.

While Alabama was assuring everyone this time would be different, Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea was busy explaining this time would be like every other time.

Preparation, focus, execution.   

“They’re really excited to play” Lea said earlier this week. “We need to narrow our focus here in the next couple days just on the details within the plan.”

If teams truly are a reflection of their coach, Vanderbilt is a carbon copy of the measured but intense Lea. When the former Vanderbilt fullback first returned to his alma mater, he promised the goal wasn’t any different than any other school. 

He walked to the podium at his first SEC Media Days in 2021 – after a winless season in 2020 under Derek Mason – and said the goal is to win a national championship. And there was laughter in the big room. 

Because it’s never about what can be at Vandy, always about what has been. 

It’s not about the seven wins last season, the most at the school since 2013. It’s not about how Lea has transformed the roster with impact players from the transfer portal that just about nobody else wanted — and the detailed player development it takes to beat schools with significantly more advantages than you.

Like Alabama. Or Auburn. Or Florida.

It’s not about how Pavia has become a legitimate thrower this season, and how the offense is more dangerous because of it. His completion percentage is 75 percent, and he has 13 touchdown passes — while averaging nearly 10 yards per attempt.

But instead of embracing the new Heisman Trophy candidate no one expected, we’re focusing on the guy who already won it — who will parachute into the big moment in Tuscaloosa to reclaim some Q time. 

That’s Johnny Manziel on the Vanderbilt sideline. In a Pavia jersey. 

Stop it, already.

Football is the story at Vanderbilt. 

Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.