Vanderbilt Commodores College Football Preview 2021: What Will Happen, Season Prediction
It’s such a heavy lift to try consistently winning at Vanderbilt.
To be harsh, it’s sort of this simple – the program needs a squishy-soft non-conference slate and help from a few struggling SEC programs to push for a winning record. That’s life in the most brutal conference in college football.
Last year was a nine-game all-SEC slate, but there should’ve been more production and at least one win.
There was a strong showing in the – in retrospect, shocking – 17-12 loss at Texas A&M to kick things off. There were good fights in road losses at Mississippi State and Kentucky, and Sarah Fuller broke the college football gender barrier as the first female player to see time in a game.
That was it for the positives.
The offense couldn’t score, the defense couldn’t stop anyone from scoring – for the most part – and it was the first winless season in the history of the program going back to 1902.
Not to be snarky – okay, maybe a little bit cheeky – but it took something special to come up with the worst season in the history of Vanderbilt football.
That’s going to change right away.
Set The Vanderbilt Commodores Regular Season Win Total At … 3.5
ETSU, at Colorado State, UConn. Those have to be wins for Clark Lea and the new coaching staff, and if everything goes right, the home game against Stanford has to at least be interesting.
South Carolina is going through a transition. That’s a road game, as is the trip to Tennessee, but Mississippi State, Kentucky and Missouri all have to come to Nashville.
There’s no Alabama, no LSU, and no Texas A&M, Auburn or Arkansas to deal with. So again, for Vandy to be successful, it has to take down the mediocre non-conference teams and beat the sputtering SEC programs.
The last win over a Power Five program that finished with a winning record was against Kansas State in mid-September of 2016. The last win over an SEC team that finished with a winning record was the 45-34 win over Tennessee to close out the 2016 season.
It’s a new coaching staff, it’s a new season coming off the global pandemic year, and it’s a team full of young and promising parts to potentially rise up.
And it all might be enough to come up with the program’s best season in a while.
[protected-iframe id=”361699434b6d70baf15f631ed2408ac1-97672683-92922408″ info=”https://www.googletagservices.com/tag/js/gpt.js” ]