Why Clark Lea Wasn’t Happy With Tuesday’s Vanderbilt Football Practice – Sports Illustrated

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Vanderbilt football head coach Clark Lea was not shy about his feeling of how his team practiced Tuesday, just four days away from kicking off the 2026 season.
“I did not like the way we practiced today. I felt like we gave into the heat,” Lea said in his opening statement in his first weekly press conference Tuesday.
Giving into the heat is not something abnormal this time of year. The temperature in Nashville at the time of practice was in the 90s with a heat index hitting triple digits. But that is not an acceptable reason for Lea’s team to not give everything it has.
For the vast majority of fall camp, practices like Tuesday were more so an outlier than the normalcy of August. Lea did note that last Wednesday's practice was another one of those days where he sensed his team was just going through the motions in practice rather than pouring blood, sweat and tears into it.
Lea gave his team a challenge post-Wednesday practice and pre-Thursday practice on effort and energy and he saw his guys respond. It seems as though Tuesday’s practice was another of those situations.
He was not happy with Tuesday’s practice, so he is challenging his team to be better over the next couple days going into Saturday’s game.
“I don’t want to be overly dramatic because I want to be honest. There were elements of practice that I liked and where I thought – go back to last Wednesday – things that I thought were kind of off,” Lea said. “I thought the quarterback play seemed like it was decisive. I thought defensively on the whole it felt like a spirited day. There were just a couple of groups that felt like we lacked the intensity we’re going to need and I see that as being conditional.”
To make sure his team is as energized as it can be by Saturday, Lea said that Vanderbilt will get out of the scorching heat and will practice indoors over the next two days.
Lea and the coaching staff want a team that is prepared to the maximum. He wants his guys to be a team that is “unconditional.” One that is ready for the ball to be snapped and everything runs smoothly from the first play onward.
Perhaps Lea and the coaching staff will take advantage of a day where they felt like their guys could have done better. In wins and losses, there are always lessons learned and things to clean up. Lea is hoping his guys will respond to his challenge in practice over the next couple of days.
“I want a fresh and fast team Saturday, but we’re expecting it to be hot Saturday. And I need to see 115 people, every single one of us attacking the field independent of the conditions. I just felt like it wasn’t 100% today,” Lea said.
Lea feels good about the way his guys are going to respond. Before Vanderbilt kicks off Saturday night, the program is going to lean on the way it practiced a majority of the time in camp to carry them through the rest of preparation. Battling the weather can be a mental game, one that Vanderbilt plans to win.
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Graham Baakko is a writer for Vanderbilt Commodores On SI, primarily covering football, basketball and baseball. Graham is a recent graduate from the University of Alabama, where he wrote for The Crimson White, WVUA-FM, WVUA 23 as he covered a variety of Crimson Tide sports. He also covered South Carolina athletics as a sportswriting intern for GamecockCentral.
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