Our chat with Anchor of Gold
The final Q&A of 2025 comes at you from Thomas Stephenson of Anchor of Gold. The Vandy SBN site chatted with us about that crazy win over Bama, how awesome Diego Pavia is to watch, and the tumultuous season the Commodores have experienced this year. Even though neither of these teams ended up in a glamorous bowl game, the opponents both being historical rivals and driving distance from the bowl site makes this a much more exciting game than it otherwise would’ve been.
1. Vandy had a brutal schedule this year and some chaotic wins and losses. 1. Does the high of beating Bama at home make up for dropping a game to Georgia State? With 3 losses coming against Top 10 teams, a 6-6 record seems like a pretty good season. How are Vandy fans feeling coming into the bowl game at 6-6 after the 2024 regular season?
Unquestionably yes. Beating Bama when they were ranked #1 in the country turned the Georgia State loss from the kind of dumb, season-wrecking loss that we’ve become all too used to into a minor annoyance, but especially because Vandy followed through and won road games at Kentucky and Auburn to get to bowl eligibility for the first time since 2018. And yeah, we’re feeling pretty good considering that most of us looked at the schedule before the season and thought “oh God, we’re going 3-9, aren’t we?” There’s a mild undercurrent of dissatisfaction with ending the season on a three-game losing streak, though. Excusable considering who we played, less excusable after watching Ohio State turn Tennessee into a grease stain (a thing that I of course had to mention somewhere in this Q&A.)
2. Diego Pavia is one of the most fun QBs in the country to watch play. His completion percentage, at just below 60%, isn’t ideal, but his TD to INT ratio at 17-4 is pretty sparkling. What’s been the key to his success this year? Has the team been building and developing around him, or he is that much of a game-changer of a signal caller?
The full story is that in addition to Pavia, Vanderbilt also hired his former offensive coordinator (to the same position) and head coach (to an off-field role) over the offseason, and also brought in a tight end (Eli Stowers) from New Mexico State, and somehow also brought in their NIL guy — the running joke all season among Vanderbilt fans is that we’ve become New Mexico State’s Nashville satellite campus. Let’s just say that he brings a, um, unique skillset to the game that SEC teams just haven’t seen all that much. (Ironically I’ve heard a lot of people compare him to Haynes King, and I can see some real similarities there, although they took very different paths to get where they are — one an underrecruited guy from New Mexico who had to go through a JUCO and New Mexico State to prove his worth, the other a four-star from East Texas who got lost in the shuffle at Texas A&M.) It’s not clear if SEC defensive coordinators got a book on him down the stretch or if it was really just that he was banged up starting around the Kentucky game, when some defenses decided that the way to beat Vanderbilt was to take cheap shots at the quarterback. But the big key to his success has been to really limit negative plays — he takes few sacks and throws few interceptions and generally keeps the Vanderbilt offense moving forward even if it’s 3-4 yards at a time.
3. On the defensive side of the ball, who should be be looking out for? I remember watching a Vandy game earlier this season and hearing Fontenette’s name called several times, which scares me as a Yellow Jacket fan, because strong LB corps are largely what’s needed to stop our offensive attack.
Fontenette is in fact the big playmaker on Vanderbilt’s defense, though I think it’s a stretch to call him a linebacker (Clark Lea is notorious for using a lot of “hybrid” defensive players, which Fontenette definitely falls into as a safety/linebacker tweener.) The actual linebacker I really like is Bryan Longwell, who hilariously posted a screenshot of a text message an Auburn coach sent him telling him they didn’t have a spot for him after Vandy beat Auburn, and CJ Taylor has been a rock for four years. The defensive line had its moments early in the season though it’s become less of a strength as injuries have piled up.
4. How good / bad of a job do you think Clark Lea has done over the last 4 seasons? He has some big wins, but also some pretty terrible losses… which we also identify with. Is he a good long-term fit for the Commodores? And more broadly, what do you think is the ceiling for Vanderbilt in the modern college football landscape?
It’s hard to say, because I think Lea came in with a plan that he’d been spending his entire career working on, and then actually got to Vanderbilt and found out that your plan doesn’t work in an era where a true freshman track star you took a chance on takes the top off Kirby Smart’s defense… and then Georgia calls him up, offers him a big bag of cash, and all of a sudden he’s playing for Georgia. (I assume Georgia slander is welcomed by your readership.) So then he changed course and convinced Vanderbilt boosters tired of losing to start throwing NIL money around, and got the admissions office to start relaxing some of their dumber transfer admissions policies, and… voila, a competitive SEC team. I don’t know what the ceiling is, but the advantage of the NIL era is that “how much money your alumni have” matters much more than “how willing you are to cheat” and “do your alumni own car dealerships or do they practice law or medicine?” As far as the fit goes, well, he played here and even grew up in Nashville and went to Montgomery Bell Academy (which, for those unfamiliar, is the private school down the street that traditionally sends like 10% of its graduating class to Vanderbilt, and the ones who don’t usually go to Yale or something like Lea’s classmate Barton Simmons.) As such, as long as he can keep winning at a reasonable level, he’s probably going to stick around here.
5. Do the Commodores consider Tennessee or Alabama your biggest rival? And does that change at all by sport?
Tennessee and it really isn’t even close. Hell, most Vanderbilt fans would say Kentucky and Ole Miss before we’d say Alabama. The difference between Tennessee and everyone else is that while pretty much every SEC school except for maybe Missouri (Oklahoma is TBD) regularly invades FirstBank Stadium, Tennessee fans are the only ones who think it’s a flex. Oh, yeah, and those of us who still live in the state (which doesn’t include me) have to live with them.
6. Finally, how do you see this game going? Who wins and gets to ride some positive momentum into 2025?
I really can’t get a good read on this game because I haven’t paid a ton of attention to Georgia Tech’s portal losses — I know there was the receiver but the other one I think came back from the portal, so it’s probably just going to be a contest of which of Diego Pavia and Haynes King is less banged up. I think this will be a close one that could go either way, and I’ll say Vanderbilt’s offense will come back with Pavia having had nearly a month to heal up, 30-27 Vanderbilt.
—-
Thanks again to Tom for taking the time to chat with us. Make sure and swing by Anchor of Gold this week to catch the other end of this Q&A, as well as their excellent preview content.
We’ll see you in Birmingham on Friday. Go Jackets!