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Goodman: Vanderbilt football revolution has deep roots
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Goodman: Vanderbilt football revolution has deep roots

Note: Week 10 of the college football season is here. Make your choices for Joe against the Pro and the Hero using this link or with the form integrated at the bottom of the column. Each week, the 6-0 Challenge winners will be celebrated in Joe’s weekly newsletter, “SPORTS!” Aperitif time. »

This is an opinion column.

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The transformation underway at Vanderbilt dates back to 1899, its roots in Southern football.

At the time, Vanderbilt’s biggest rival was Sewanee, and Sewanee had an extremely ambitious, half-crazed football manager named Luke Lea. It’s almost lost to time now, but Sewanee’s Luke Lea was the true godfather of the Southeastern Conference. When it came to Southern football, the man was either a genius or a madman.

Sound vaguely familiar?

All these years later, Luke Lea has a godson in Tennessee football who is also a helluva revolutionary.

First discovered in this column, Clark Lea, Vanderbilt’s head coach, is a descendant of Sewanee’s Luke Lea, the mastermind behind Sewanee’s legendary 12-0 season in 1899. I had my suspicions about Leas after researching the 1899 Sewanee football team, then Clark Lea confirmed the family connection to me during a brief conversation at SEC Media Days in 2023.

Vanderbilt plays at Auburn on Saturday and, thanks to Lea of ​​Southern’s latest college football, it will feel like the good old days in the SEC for the 11:45 a.m. kickoff. Vanderbilt is back and good at football again. It’s been a while.

With a win against the Tigers, the Commodores will sweep Alabama State in football for the first time since 1955. Despite winning against Alabama earlier this season, Vanderbilt is a 6.5-point underdog for the match.

When I wrote earlier this season that Vanderbilt could be backI got a lot of feedback from people wondering when Vandy was ever good. There was a time when Vanderbilt was the best football team in the Deep South, and part of the reason for Vandy’s rise was its growing arms race with rival Sewanee.

Clark Lea’s Vanderbilt revival bears groundbreaking similarities to the architecture that built Luke Lea’s tough-as-train Sewanee football team in 1899. Clark Lea uses the combination of NIL and the transfer portal to reshaping the way we view Vanderbilt football and the new reality of Southeastern Conference football. His Southern football forefather, Luke Lea, used every device at his disposal at the time to build one of the South’s legendary first college football teams.

GOOD MAN: Nick Saban ain’t crossing this Commodore

Clark Lea represents the future of football in the SEC. Luke Lea was at the forefront of modern college football in 1899. By the turn of the 20th century, college football was more like a club sport. But it was very competitive and the passion for the game was there from the start.

Then Luke Lea came along and changed the game.

The managers of the time were more like the sports directors of today. Luke Lea has done everything behind the scenes of Sewanee football, including setting the schedule, fundraising, recruiting players, organizing trips and writing articles for the student newspaper.

At the start of the 1899 season, Luke Lea predicted the trajectory of Southern college football before anyone else. Even back then, it was all about money. Ahead of the competition, Léa fulfilled an unprecedented schedule for Sewanee. It included 12 games – unheard of at the time, but now the norm – but there was something truly crazy about the fall lineup. It featured a 10-day, 2,500-mile train trip across the South in which Sewanee would play five road games over six days.

They filled barrels with mountain spring water for the trip and Luke Lea hired physical therapy trainers for the trip. The 18 players who made the trip across the South played during the day and slept on the train at night. And here’s the legendary part of it all. Not only did Sewanee win all of those games, but the Cumberland Plateau Tigers shut out all of their opponents.

Almost impossible to believe but true, Sewanee throttled Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss by a combined score of 91-0.

And all this happened in six grueling days.

Sewanee’s Luke Lea had revolutionary ideas when it came to college football. Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea once stood on the stage at SEC Media Days and announced to the world that Vanderbilt was going to be the best football program in the country.

After everything we’ve seen this season, I’m kind of starting to believe it.

Vanderbilt (5-3, 2-2 SEC) opened the season with a 34-27 overtime victory over Virginia Tech. Then came the monumental destruction of everything we thought we knew about the SEC. Vanderbilt 40, Alabama 35 is the kind of final score that can have long-term ramifications throughout the league.

In this new era of college football, can Clark Lea rebuild Vanderbilt into an SEC powerhouse? Doubt him at your peril. Vanderbilt nearly pulled off an upset last week against No. 5 Texas, losing to the well-heeled Longhorns 27-24. For the record, Vanderbilt’s all-time record against Texas now stands at 8-4-1.

Vandy’s all-time record against Auburn? People born after 1950 might be surprised. Auburn only took the series lead last year. The Tigers are 22-21-1 against Vanderbilt heading into Saturday’s game.

For his part, Auburn coach Hugh Freeze doesn’t view Vanderbilt’s success as a fluke. Freeze praised Clark Lea earlier this week for being one of the best coaches in the country. Freeze, of course, knows a little more about Vandy’s new attack than anyone. It’s pretty much the exact same system New Mexico State used against Auburn last season.

Even fearless quarterback Diego Pavia is the same.

In a move that would have made old Luke Lea proud, Clark Lea used the rules of an evolving game to reinvent his football team. Over the offseason, Lea had the crazy idea of ​​bringing the core of this New Mexico State team to Nashville. Even former New Mexico State coach Jerry Kill is in on the action.

“They’re good at what they are,” Freeze said, “and they’re good at what they are.”

It all starts with Pavia, the dual-threat quarterback who probably would have fit in pretty well on the Iron Man Sewanee football team of 1899. Sewanee’s run through Southern football needed a train. Presumably, Pavie and his compatriots from New Mexico State flew to Tennessee.

Poetically, the only team to score against this Sewanee team in 1899 was John Heisman’s Auburn Tigers. In a game that turned violent and ultimately had to be called due to darkness, Sewanee defeated Auburn 11-10 at Riverside Park in Montgomery on November 30, 1899.

It would be unwise to discount Vanderbilt as a one-year wonder. Behind the scenes, Clark Lea and Athletic Director Candice Lee are already building the future through the school’s NIL collective, Anchor Impact.

Almost everyone in the SEC these days has a soft spot for Vanderbilt, but Sewanee ghosts will hate that Vanderbilt is a burgeoning football power again. After all, it was a disagreement over the reception of the 1898 season between Sewanee’s Luke Lea and the Vanderbilt boys that apparently gave Lea the motivation to play 12 games in 1899.

After college, Luke Lea became a lawyer and a United States senator. And all the articles he wrote for the Sewanee newspaper came in handy, too.

Luke Lea was also the longtime publisher of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.

I’m willing to bet Luke Lea would jump into this new age Vandy revolution, albeit reluctantly. Football rivalries in the South run deep, but family is family.

MAILBAG

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Joseph Goodman is the leading sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group and author of the book “We want Bama: a season of hope and the creation of Nick Saban’s ultimate team.”