NASHVILLE—There off in the distance, above the south side of Vanderbilt’s bleachers on the visiting sideline is a representation of hope. It’s a few feet of brick and doesn’t offer a look at anything insightful, but inside those bricks is the place where excitement feels inevitable.
It’s Memorial Gymnasium, where Mark Byington and company have spent toe-to-toe with some of the sport’s biggest programs. It’s where preseason All-American Tyler Tanner will take the floor in the coming months, looking to lead Vanderbilt to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament and an encore to its 27-win 2025-26 season. At the very least, this program has a consensus top 25 team in the preseason.
That gym will be roaring soon as Byington’s third team uses its fun, exciting style and almost-complete roster to generate a few signature wins. Its first home exhibition game is mere hours away as Vanderbilt football takes the field for a fourth-quarter drive that feels pointless as Arkansas has already sealed its fate.
As a result, it’s easy to long for what’s likely to be in that building. Particularly because all the things that are likely to happen there in the coming months aren’t happening on this fall Saturday in FirstBank Stadium. They haven’t happened in weeks.
This Vanderbilt football team declared that it would be everything that Byington’s team will be, but it’s a far cry from that. Instead of a national championship contender or a contender to be one of the program’s best teams in recent memory, this group is in last place in the SEC and doesn’t have a game that it will be favored in left on its schedule. It may not have more than a game or two on its schedule in which it will be less than a 10-point underdog.
For all intents and purposes, this is a dead football team walking. It says it’s not throwing in the towel, is getting closer and that it has all the pieces it needs to win, but human nature has to be kicking in at some point. When its players walk into their press conferences, they appear to be demoralized and are obligated to put on a brave face. This used to be fun around here, but it no longer is.
Vanderbilt sat at a crossroads entering Saturday. If it won, it would be plausible that it could sell hope. It would be sitting with a winning record and would’ve been able to sell the difficulty of the three-week stretch it just underwent–against Georgia and Auburn on the road and Ole Miss at home–as a reason for its recent struggles. It would’ve been able to say confidently that it’s a few wins away from bowl eligibility and that it’s plausible that it could get there. It could sell its resilience and take a victory lap because of the way it responded to its blowout loss to Ole Miss.
Now that it’s lost, though, all that is off the table. So are this group’s aspirations of making a bowl game. So is the narrative that it’s getting closer to being the team it wants to be. The wheels are falling off this thing and Vanderbilt has to know that. It just lost the easiest remaining game on its schedule and has serious odds of suffering a winless SEC season, which it believed it was well beyond at this stage of the build. Vanderbilt has now lost four games in a row and each of them feels worse than the last.
That’s how you get quotes like Vanderbilt produced tonight.
“It hurts,” Vanderbilt linebacker Bryan Longwell said.
“We have to clean our game up, we have to protect the ball and if we don’t do those things we’re not going to win games,” Lea said. “We can’t be surprised when we don’t do them and we lose. We can’t be so entitled to this that we somehow feel like we were robbed tonight, because we weren’t.”
Lea and company have had their chances to prove that they are what they said they were going to be, but they clearly aren’t. They’ve played seven games and have proven that they clearly are what they are. They’ve got five games left, but it feels silly to expect much in them. As a result, Byington’s program feels like a reprieve for this athletic department. It feels like a sanctuary of sanity in which it can turn for evidence that its investment is paying off.
This is how said athletic department and its fanbase generally works this time of year, but it hasn’t the past two. Everyone around these parts generally awaits basketball and gets their hopes up for it because of the disappointment they’ve experienced as a result of football. Now, they’re back to their old form in that way. At least, it’s hard for them not to be.
While Lea’s group promises better performance down the stretch, it’s hard to believe them. They’ve said the same things for months and have failed to deliver every time they’ve taken the field since their week three miracle win over NC State. Wasting energy believing that they’re set to turn the corner feels like a fools’ errand.
But, there’s probably a better place to direct it.
A place where a deep NCAA Tournament run feels plausible. Where the team’s best player has already proven to be a star. Where he has a sound supporting cast and a coach that appears to be one of the best in his respective sport. Where there’s little doubt in regard to whether this group will be an abject failure like this football team appears to be becoming.
Lea doesn’t believe his group will give up and believes it hasn’t yet, but it may have missed its opportunity to keep the spotlight beyond Vanderbilt basketball’s Monday-night exhibition against UAB.
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