NASHVILLE — Two days before his debut as Vanderbilt’s head coach, Clark Lea ended practice by lining up his roster on the sideline. The players had to spread out between the 25-yard lines, none bunched up more than three-deep. Then they had to walk forward and spend the next two minutes visualizing what it would be like to shake hands with East Tennessee State after the game on Saturday night.
Advertisement
Lea said nothing about the outcome, barely acknowledging there would be one. This was an exercise in behavior, not a predictor of results.
After simulating handshakes, Vanderbilt drilled another postgame ritual, singing the alma mater. The team stood together in the southeast corner of an empty stadium on a Thursday evening, addressing what it hoped would be a full student section. They all sang. Then they sang it again. Then Vanderbilt moved to midfield and sang the school’s fight song, lyrics on the north end zone video board in case anyone needed them. It was the kind of thing teams do after they win. But Vanderbilt had not won in more than a calendar year, part of the reason why the school fired Derek Mason last November and brought home an alum who had risen up the coaching ranks to a successful stint as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator.
Finally, after the faux handshakes and song practice, Lea had two members of the program model the black track suits and gold Nike shoes Vanderbilt would wear to the team hotel on Saturday. Lea likes to talk about mastering the mundane and finding greatness within it. He wanted to leave nothing to chance, not even fashion.
“How do you measure progress in the infancy?” Lea told The Athletic last week, amid an all-access look at his fledgling rebuild. “It’s the ability to own and execute all these small details in the program. I don’t want them to feel like they’re set up to fail.”
The stressing of these details could have been easily tuned out, dismissed by a reflex. But the Commodores have come to know their new head coach in the past nine months, and vice versa. Lea tries to see every angle from every angle. He’s been preaching that ever since he returned to Nashville after four seasons and two trips to the College Football Playoff in South Bend.
Advertisement
Everyone understood the message. Then Saturday night happened.
In a revelatory gut punch, East Tennessee State routed Vanderbilt 23-3. Even for a program that has put together a winning record in SEC play once during Lea’s lifetime, this was difficult to stomach. Vanderbilt was pushed around in the trenches by an FCS program that played a spring season. It barely had a coherent thought offensively, switching back and forth between two quarterbacks. Turns out, Lea had demoted his first offensive coordinator hire about a week into preseason camp. On defense, where Lea knows exactly what he wants, Vanderbilt couldn’t stop the run and couldn’t force a turnover. These were markers of a head coach needing to learn, even as he taught.
The final indignity came when East Tennessee State’s Karon Delince picked off quarterback Ken Seals and returned it 99 yards for a touchdown, only to have the score taken off the board for taunting the Commodores as he backpedaled into the end zone. East Tennessee State didn’t need the points anyway.
Yet Vanderbilt stuck to its script postgame, shaking hands with East Tennessee State when the Buccaneers weren’t celebrating. They sang the alma mater in front of the few students who remained in a section that was nearly full at kickoff.
There would be no fight song in the locker room.
Beneath Vanderbilt Stadium, a venue overdue for renovations by a generation, Lea huddled with his assistant coaches to set another message. By the time he emerged, players had been standing in stunned silence in the cramped locker room for nearly 10 minutes. They took a knee before Lea spoke.
“It will not get lower than this. This is it,” Lea said. “This is the depth of our adversity so as long as we commit to stand together and fighting forward and we find the lessons in this game.
Advertisement
“It has never been about East Tennessee State. It has never been about this game. The entire journey has been about Vanderbilt football and Team One. The choice you get to make right now is whether you believe there’s more for us moving forward.”
It’s fair to question what more there might be. Vanderbilt heads to Colorado State next and then hosts Stanford before opening SEC play. That’s when names like Georgia and Florida start to appear on the schedule. If Saturday night really was Vanderbilt football, well, Lea didn’t need to articulate the consequences of that post-game.
Lea does understand the score here. During his three seasons as a walk-on fullback for Bobby Johnson, the Commodores went 2-22 in the SEC. He watched from a distance last fall as Vanderbilt bottomed out with nine losses in nine games, a season remembered for history-making kicker Sarah Fuller and little else.
Yes, this rebuild is massive. It was always going to be. Saturday night simply showed the scale of Lea’s undertaking, from recruiting to development to mentality.
Vanderbilt identifies its current roster as “Team One” in an attempt to shed everything that came before. Lea wanted to enter the year with a clean slate, but that didn’t stop him from doing his homework. He watched not only game tapes from last season but the practice film, too. Maybe players thought they could be somebody else under a new coach, and maybe they can. But Lea didn’t forgive the behaviors that got Vanderbilt to this point.
When quarterback Ken Seals worked up the nerve to introduce himself to Lea last winter, he tried to bring some prior knowledge to the conversation. Turns out, he didn’t know nearly as much about Lea as Lea knew about him.
“I definitely wasn’t expecting what I got, I’ll say that,” Seals said. “The first thing he talked to me about was I was late for one of the practices last year. He had already known. Some other guys said he watched every practice from last season and he knew who we were before we even put on pads. He goes through everything. He does not leave any detail, anything unplanned. It was very different from what it was in the past.
Advertisement
“He mentioned to me how I couldn’t maintain good eye contact, I couldn’t set my chin and I didn’t have good body language. Now I always think about that in my first impressions and presentations. I was very intimidated at the time.”
The changes started with winter workouts. First, Vanderbilt’s players were deprived of their team-issue gear, forced to wear generic black shorts and shirts, short sleeve and long. Then they went into the stadium to practice a warmup. The routine is supposed to last about eight minutes if done perfectly. If any player false-stepped, misaligned or fell out of order, the warmup started over.
For the next two weeks, Vanderbilt did nothing but warm up, often for 90 minutes at a time. They failed and failed and failed. If players put their hands in their pockets, under their armpits or in their shorts, it was a fail. Start over.
“To do a warmup repeatedly with no workout, it made it colder than it had to be,” said defensive end Elijah McAllister. “At first it’s, I don’t know about this, right? I kind of know how to warm up. I know how to play football, I just really want to get in the X’s and O’s. But I understood there was a bigger picture for the totality of the program.”
During those first two weeks in January, 28 players skipped, missed or were late. Lea noticed. The players noticed, too. A few left, including last year’s top running backs. Most stayed, starving for any kind of direction, even if it was how to properly line up and stretch.
“It felt like I was in boot camp. I’d get into the locker room after and it felt like my fingernails were about to explode off my hands,” Seals said. “It was a different toughness and mentality.
“That was his first thing. He said a lot of guys in the program were mentally weak. Step one was to get that out of there.”
Advertisement
Eventually, Vanderbilt learned what Lea wanted and why. As much as the repetitive warmup in mid-winter felt punitive, Lea explained those weeks as a first test the program must pass together. If the cliché winter workout tests the body, Lea wanted to see how he could push their minds. And then he would watch who passed, with more and more players making the grade each day.
“I felt like the program had reached a point of despair where it was necessary to strip everything down,” Lea said. “Whatever collateral damage came up in the process, I had to be willing to accept.
“In those instances it forced them to rely on their teammates. Even though it’s a suck, it’s a shared suck. I felt it was necessary to strip it all the way down.”
Rebuilding started two months later.
On a Saturday night in March, Lea put the players through a stadium workout that he hoped to use as a point of departure. The players had mastered the warmup. They knew the schedule. They were starting to get their head coach’s vocabulary, unique as it may be within the profession. So Lea wanted to take things a step further.
When the workout ended, players were split into groups and handed posterboard and markers. They were told to write down everything they believed had held the program back in seasons prior: Selfishness, doubt, facilities, etc. They collected the boards, then threw them into a barrel and burned them.
“I took a little step back from the fire because I’m not sure how things are supposed to burn,” McAllister said. “You can place it in the back of your mind, but to see it burning, being put away, it was amazing. That night was a sense of relief, letting go of the past.”
Then the groups were tasked with figuring out what they wanted Vanderbilt football to be next. What would guide Team One? Leaders from each group were selected and sent to the locker room to deliberate. There were no coaches present. When they emerged, defensive lineman Daevion Davis walked to midfield on the Star V with a spotlight on him. He presented the Five Agreements, tenets of a mission statement for Vanderbilt football moving forward.
Advertisement
True Brotherhood
Pride In Everything We Do
Earn It Every Day
Player To Player Accountability
Positive Energy To Each Other
“If there’s ever a doubt of how we should act on and off the field,” McAllister said, “we have those five agreements.”
Lea has the original copy framed in his office, a homemade outlier in a Silicon Valley-style space that includes a Peloton, a foam roller, a high-end coffee machine and new furniture. The Five Agreements are posted in the locker room, too, which was renovated this offseason as part of some literal construction around Vanderbilt’s facilities. Some coaches have the agreements as their cell phone lock screens.
That phone wallpaper is especially dear to Kaelene Curry, who was hired as the football program’s director of mental performance last winter. It’s a new position to Vanderbilt but not to Lea, who saw the power of the role at Notre Dame after Brian Kelly added Dr. Amber Selking to the staff. Like Selking, Curry meets with players one-on-one, attempting to train their minds to be more open than closed, more proactive than reactive.
There is no couch in Curry’s office, and that’s by design: Curry doesn’t want players to see her as somebody to come to when something is broken, especially when everyone has to pass by offensive and defensive meeting rooms to get there.
“When I was introduced, I talked about how it’s about training your mind the way you train your body,” Curry said. “Allow your mind to be another tool in your toolbox and other weapon for you rather than something that an opponent can use against you or another opponent. I had a couple players come in later on that week, and they were like, ‘How do I use my mind as a weapon?’ Nice, that landed.”
Lea knew how Curry’s field can be turned into a positive from his time at Notre Dame, and as someone who can get lost in his own thoughts, he understands the value of giving players maps to get out of their own heads.
Advertisement
“It’s been a game changer in changing the team’s attitude overall,” Seals said. “Some guys like it, some are working on liking it. If you take it and apply it, it can really help you.”
The starting quarterback meets one-on-one with Curry every week. Seals struggles to let bad plays go; Curry helps him unwind that reaction. Now, after throwing two interceptions and fumbling a scoop-and-score against East Tennessee State, that mental performance coaching will be tested. Seals can’t do anything about last Saturday night. Curry has helped him think about the next one.
Clearly, Lea could not have imagined calling on Curry’s work to help his team process a 20-point loss to an FCS opponent. But it’s what Vanderbilt needs.
“There’s a gap that exists in college football, and a lot of it has to do with the level of transaction embedded in this game,” Lea said. “We spend a ton of time on tactics, strategies, plays. We spend almost no time on the mental experience for our players, which is agonizing.”
But as much as Lea wants to develop the entire football player at Vanderbilt, last weekend made clear what should have already been obvious: Vanderbilt needs to recruit better football players.
The red helicopter passed over Montgomery Bell Academy during the final bars of the national anthem Friday night, touching down on a soccer field on the west edge of campus. Considering this elite private school is located barely two miles from Vanderbilt, chopper was hardly Lea’s only available mode of transportation.
He spent most of the first half talking with headmaster Bradford Gioia, who led the school when Lea was an MBA student himself. So maybe a grand entrance wasn’t the point. Lea watched a few plays of three-star Vanderbilt commitment Kenzy Paul, who caught a 12-yard touchdown in the first quarter for the McCallie School. He watched a few snaps of three-star senior MBA offensive tackle Grayson Morgan, too, plus four-star junior quarterback Marcel Reed.
Advertisement
At halftime Lea exited, shaking a few hands on the way out before flying to the game between Father Ryan and Pope John Paul II, about 18 miles away. These were Lea’s first off-campus recruiting visits as Vanderbilt’s head coach, more than nine months after taking the job. The point of this recruiting exercise was to see and be seen, with an emphasis on the latter on these Friday nights.
For Lea, style matters, too. He set the dress code for his staff on high school visits as business casual. Vanderbilt wanted to project a professional recruiting operation. Sure enough, when running backs coach Norval McKenzie arrived at MBA by car before kickoff, he came in a black Vanderbilt polo, khaki pants and black wingtips. Lea wore a black Vanderbilt shirt and dark slacks.
These small details resonate with Lea because the big data is so sobering. In 247Sports’ SEC team recruiting rankings, Vanderbilt has finished 12th or worse in each of the past four classes. It has signed a total of four four-star prospects in that time. At Notre Dame, Lea had more than four four-star prospects in his position group.
“We have to be aware of where Vanderbilt football is in the food chain,” said general manager Barton Simmons. “The best area in the world to look for college football talent is a four- or five-hour drive here. That’s a big advantage.
“We’re in the SEC, which is the only conference that matters anymore. We’re going to make sure people know that.”
Simmons rates among Lea’s most interesting hires, reuniting with one of his best friends from grade school and a teammate at MBA. Lea has a picture of their freshman football team in his office. They were in each other’s weddings. But the personal connection matters less than the professional. Simmons came to Vanderbilt from 247Sports, where he helped lead its scouting department. He knows what a successful recruiting department looks like. He knows what a failing one looks like, too.
After working with a “skeleton crew” under Mason, Vanderbilt now has four full-time employees in scouting and at least another four in the recruiting department. The entire operation takes a developmental outlook, imagining more what Vanderbilt’s roster can be in three years than what it can be right now. Sometimes it can swipe higher-level prospects, like former Notre Dame commit Darren Agu, a defensive end from Georgia who had an offer from Alabama. Agu would have developed on the bench in South Bend for two or three years before playing. He can develop on the field in Nashville as a freshman.
Advertisement
But most Vanderbilt commits will have lower profiles. And they might need more time.
That’s fine for Simmons, for now. Whatever Northwestern and Stanford are today after Week 1 losses of their own, they’re still ahead of Vanderbilt. Those are the gaps this program wants to close, while also winning battles against lower-tier SEC teams.
As Simmons sees it, there’s no reason why Vanderbilt can’t eventually turn itself into an academic destination with more football pull than Evanston or Palo Alto. The private schools of Atlanta and Nashville should be the Commodores’ recruiting backyard. He also knows the program has a long way to go to get there, even before the loss to East Tennessee State.
“Right now it’s hard for us to beat Northwestern in recruiting,” Simmons said. “They are everything that we are, in a big city, they’re high academic, all stuff they’re able to differentiate themselves with. But once we start winning …”
When the recruiting dead period opened on June 1, Vanderbilt hosted about 1,300 prospects over four camps, on top of official visits. There’s a long road to travel for the recruiting department to reestablish itself within its regional footprint. In the past five cycles, Vanderbilt signed just four prospects ranked among the top 25 players in its home state. Tennessee signed 28.
Even as Lea walked to the sidelines of his high school alma mater, the cream orange of Tennessee stood out more than any Vanderbilt gear in the stands. Still, Lea believes Simmons and his recruiting staff learned a lot in the past eight months, even working within a stunted recruiting calendar.
“We’ll be better for it,” Lea said, passing through the lobby of MBA to his helicopter. “We can lock arms and move forward together.”
Twenty-four hours later, Vanderbilt would get a reminder of how far the program has to go.
Lea walked to the front of the Marriott ballroom, his team sitting at attention in those black track suits with gold Nike shoes. Kickoff was two hours away, and he wanted to deliver another message.
Lea looked the part: tailored gray suit, black and gold striped tie. He held an index card of notes in his right hand but didn’t need it. This was more about creating a feeling, anyway.
Advertisement
“At some point you made a choice to build this anew,” Lea said. “To put a spirit into it, to give it a chance to become what we know it can be.”
Then Lea told the entire team to stand up and appreciate one another. In a Catholic church, what came next would have looked like the sign of peace. In a college football program, it was a lot of one-armed hugs and back slapping. And instead of the players connecting with whomever was to their right, left, front and back, they circled to the room for the next three minutes seeking out as many teammates as possible, some surrounding Lea himself.
Considering how disparate the roster was when Lea arrived, this was progress. In fact, one of Curry’s first observations last winter was how many players didn’t even know their teammates’ names. The progress being made was good. It’s just that every other college football program took this step forward a long time ago.
About six hours later, Vanderbilt’s players gathered around Lea again in a very different mood. Hope had been replaced by hurt. Vanderbilt had steeled itself somewhat for losing this season, but it wasn’t supposed to lose like this against a team like that.
“Everyone’s gonna want to have an opinion about where we are,” Lea said in the locker room. “Everyone is gonna want to have an opinion about Vanderbilt, what is gonna happen next. But I’m telling you, it’s never been about them, it’s never been about East Tennessee State. It’s about this team pushing to its potential.
“We needed this lesson tonight. We needed this lesson so we can push further to find out what our potential is.”
So much evidence of that potential comes in the future tense, though. There are plans to renovate the dilapidated football stadium and build a new indoor facility as part of a master plan for athletics. Vanderbilt won’t have two outdoor fields of different lengths anymore. As it stands, neither is 100 yards. It won’t have to bus to its indoor facility in inclement weather. The university is backing athletics at unprecedented levels, with $300 million marked for improvements in the Vandy United campaign.
Advertisement
Lea likes to talk about a 10-year plan because the school has one, but it doesn’t make nights like Saturday go down any easier. He’s also self-aware enough to know coaches don’t get to take long views when they’re losing to FCS opponents. Vanderbilt gets that, too.
“Everybody knows you keep score in sports for a reason,” McAllister said. “Coach Lea talks about we’re here to win. We’re here to win now. We’re not here to win in 10 years.”
Finally, just after 11:30 p.m., Lea broke the huddle in the locker room, ending the hardest night of his coaching life.
“Team One on three,” he said.
“One, two, three, Team One,” he got in response.
Players gathered up their gear and began to make their way toward the exit. But before they could, Lea darted to the locker room door, making sure everybody had to pass him on the way out.
He shook hands with each of them.
(Photo: Matthew Maxey / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
