How Vanderbilt Went From SEC Doormat to Dark Horse CFP Candidate

NASHVILLE — When No. 17 Vanderbilt took down No. 10 LSU at home in a decisive 31–24 win Saturday, fans didn’t storm the field. They certainly didn’t carry off the field goal posts like they did when Vanderbilt upset Alabama last year. 

The prevailing feeling at FirstBank Stadium was one of calm. The home fans acted like they’ve been here, even though the school hasn’t started a season 6-1 since 1950.

In the postgame press conference, there wasn’t much fanfare from Vanderbilt administration, either. Standing at the podium in a press room that doesn’t seat more than 20 people, head coach Clark Lea spent his opening remarks analyzing the team’s performance as if it was any other Saturday. In the back of the room, athletic director Candice Storey Lee sat quietly.

“Internally, we expect to win,” Lea told reporters postgame. “That’s just part of our DNA.”

Defensive lineman Khordae Syndor said, “This is the new Vandy. We are going to win.” Tight end Cole Spence added: “We’re trying to go win a national championship.” 

It’s emblematic of the transformation Vanderbilt football has undergone in the past five years. The team long mocked as the “doormat of the SEC” is already bowl eligible for the second year in a row. They’re contenders for a Top 10 AP ranking. They’re a dark horse candidate to make the College Football Playoff, with multiple ranked wins. And quarterback Diego Pavia is in the Heisman conversation. 

During the postgame press conference, Lea directly credited athletic director Lee, who hired him in 2020. “You can’t talk about our success without leadership,” Lea said, gesturing at her.

It’s hard to believe that Lee, a former Vanderbilt women’s basketball player, has only been running the athletic department for five years. She took the helm at the height of the pandemic in 2020. She credits Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier, who joined shortly after her, with fully supporting her vision.

Prominently displayed in Lee’s office: a piece of the goalpost that was carried off by fans after Vanderbilt upset Alabama at home last year, and a poster showing the score. 

Lee’s first big move was hiring Notre Dame defensive coordinator Lea as the head football coach. Lea had played fullback at Vanderbilt in the early 2000s, but didn’t have much success then; few who played at Vanderbilt during those years did. After stints coaching across the country, he came back to Music City, where he grew up and earned both an undergraduate and graduate degree in political science.

“I recognized in him what I feel personally—and that’s just a deep belief that we can be more than what perhaps other people have contemplated that Vanderbilt could be,” Lee told Front Office Sports in her office on Friday. “He’s a deep thinker, and he does everything with intentionality.”

In 2021, Diermeier and Lee launched Vandy United, a $300 million investment project to overhaul the entirety of the athletic department facilities. “It’s no secret that there had been under-investment in athletics,” Lee said, adding that the $300 million war chest “sends a signal that we are serious about significant investment.” 

The first $100 million was given by an anonymous donor before the school ever broke ground on the project. Then the university invested $100 million of its own. The last $100 million would come from thousands of different donors. 

“I just think that when you talk to people who are longtime fans and supporters, they heard stuff and never saw action to follow it up,” associate athletic director Brian Fremund told FOS on Friday. “And this is the first time, I think, they would’ve seen that action.”

FirstBank Stadium is the smallest in the SEC—with about 40,000 seat capacity, it’s less than half the size of multiple other stadiums in the SEC. Kyle Field, home of Texas A&M, holds about 102,000.

The Commodores didn’t attempt to build an entirely new stadium. Instead they revitalized what they had. The North endzone was renovated to include new premium seating and open the Huber Center, which, among other things, is the “operations hub” for men’s and women’s basketball (many schools house multiple team operations in their on-campus football stadiums), a project completed right before the 2024 season. The South endzone, which features luxury boxes for fans, donors, and a box for Diermeier, as well as a new locker room for the Commodores, opened this season.

The rebuild still continues, with walled off areas of dirt, gravel and construction sites snaking through the stadium and athletic department buildings. But so does the fundraising: the commodores have raised $370 million for the Vandy United project alone. 

One of those major donations: In 2023, Jennifer Rose Frist and her husband Billy Frist made an “unprecedented” donation to build an entire athletics village.

“We’re under construction,” Lee said, referring to both the building project and the football program. “It’s dirty, it’s messy. We invite you in—and we invite you in to watch our progress. … That’s the same thing we did with this football program. We will let you see.” 

In Lee’s office Friday afternoon, Lee and Fremund reminisced about a moment during Lea’s first SEC media days, when he said that Vanderbilt football would eventually be the best program in the country. “People laughed at that,” Lee said. Fremund added: “It was a viral thing, because people couldn’t believe that he would say that.”

It took several years to show that the program might actually achieve those heights. Lea began the 2023 season with a contract extension, but ended it with only two wins and a mass exodus of players into the transfer portal.

That offseason was an inflection point. First, Lea overhauled the coaching roster, bringing in multiple staffers from the New Mexico State Aggies—perhaps most notably head coach Jerry Kill, who took on a role of chief consultant to the head coach and senior offensive advisor. 

The Commodores also embraced the system of unrestricted free agency created by an unfettered NIL (name, image, and likeness) era and transfer portal.

“For years it was, it was like, someone transferred out, it was a blemish on the program, it was a blemish on him. Can’t have that,” Fremund said. “And then it’s like, no, wait a minute, we need to reimagine how we’re approaching it.”

Lea decided to reevaluate his attitude and approach to the transfer portal, bringing in multiple players including New Mexico State quarterback Diego Pavia, who has not only helped transform the Commodores on the field, but has led a revolution of sorts by filing the first eligibility lawsuit against the NCAA—and winning.

Another key was investing more heavily in NIL. Paul Grindstaff, yet another key hire from New Mexico State, took the helm of the Vanderbilt NIL collective Anchor Impact in October 2024. 

Technically, he started working before the upset win over Alabama. The night of the game, Grindstaff “was at dinner in Fort Worth… upstairs in the corner on the phone as we were teeing up fundraising things that would go live the next day,” he told FOS during an interview in the same small conference room, above a Starbucks on campus, in which he’s negotiated dozens of NIL contracts. 

Grindstaff took up an office in one of the athletic buildings—a statement in itself given that many schools don’t have NIL collective officials in their athletic buildings. When the season ended, he went to work trying to retain as many players as possible with NIL money.

Neither Grindstaff nor Lee agreed to divulge the school’s NIL budget, but they did give a few hints. Grindstaff joked that he wished he could have eight-figures for third-party NIL; he also noted that the Commodores have much less money than some other schools in the SEC. The football team likely has somewhere in the seven-figure range. 

After Pavia won an injunction that would give him another year of eligibility, he secured a new contract renewal worth at least $2 million. 

“Winning is not inexpensive,” Grindstaff said.

Lee did confirm that the Commodores have committed to spend up to the top of the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap in the wake of the House v. NCAA settlement. She declined to say exactly how much of that is going to football, but said it’s in line with other SEC schools, which puts it likely between 65% and 75%.

This year’s team jumped out to a 3-0 winning streak, earning a No. 20 ranking in the AP Poll after beating South Carolina. They’ve been ranked ever since, and their only loss so far is a 30–14 loss to Alabama in Tuscaloosa two weeks ago. 

After beating LSU, the team will continue to make its case for a College Football Playoff berth. Clark Lea and his squad expect to be there.