Exclusive: Inside How Cole Spence is Preparing For an Increased Receiving Role – Sports Illustrated

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It is the dog days of summer and Vanderbilt tight end Cole Spence starts his day at 5:30 a.m. After a Bible study, breakfast and stretching, Spence and the rest of Vanderbilt’s football team is ready to go for practice.
He and the rest of the tight end room work on run blocking schemes throughout practice, but the day’s work is just getting started for Spence. After practice is where Spence really prepares for his role this season. With former Vanderbilt tight end Eli Stowers departing for the NFL, Spence now steps into the leading role in the Vanderbilt passing game among the tight ends. After each practice, Spence immediately goes to the jugs machine where he makes sure to always catched 100 balls.
While Spence has had a love for the blocking role he has had throughout his Vanderbilt career, being involved as a primary pass catcher is something he could not be more eager for. After all, being a receiving tight end is what has been his staple going back to his high school days.
“I’m excited,” Spence told Vandy On SI on his feeling toward stepping into more of a primary pass catching role this season. “When you talk about playing tight end, there are two facets to the game: the blocking and the receiving. In the past couple years, the team has needed me to lean more into my blocking ability because we had such a talented guy in Eli, and I mean, you can't replace that guy. But I'm really excited to be able to just step into that other part of the game, because keep in mind I was a receiver first, so that was my bread and butter.”
Coming out of Mount Pisgah Christian School in Atlanta, Georgia, Spence led his team in receiving with 55 receptions for 957 yards. He led high school tight ends in Georgia in total yards his senior season and was ranked fifth amongst tight ends in the 2021 high school class in yards per game.
To put it another way, Spence is no stranger to being put into a main pass-catching role. His collegiate stats may not necessarily indicate that, but it is because he was in a blocking role more times than not.
But there are numbers that do indicate Spence is qualified to play a heavy role in the passing game this season. Entering the 2026 season, Spence is second among returning SEC tight ends in yards per reception and holds the fourth-highest Pro Football Focus (PFF) receiving grade among returning SEC tight ends.
His preparation to be the best receiving tight end he can be for Vanderbilt this season goes deeper than just practicing on the jugs machine, though.
Spence has been working with Vanderbilt defensive analyst Bob Shoop to improve on reading various defensive coverages. From cover four match to cover six to base cover four and a large variety of cover two defensive looks, Spence is learning a whole new way to read defenses when the time comes to step onto the field of FirstBank Stadium this fall.
“What he's doing is he's just teaching us how the defensive players view their defense so that when I'm out there lining up on the field, I can just have these little tells, like, 'Oh, that linebacker's tucked to them a little bit more to the box.’ Well, then it can't be this coverage because if it was cover four, he would need to be able to be out in the flat, he wouldn't be that tight into the box,” Spence said as he walked Vandy On SI inside the way he had been reading defenses with Shoop.
The work he has put into recognizing numerous defensive coverages is perhaps the most important aspect of his game he has worked on in terms of wanting to be a receiving threat in the upcoming season. 
Spence’s goal for coverage recognition is to be able to help out the quarterback, especially in a season where Vanderbilt is going to have a new starting quarterback.
In an ideal world, if the work he has been putting in truly pays off, he essentially becomes a second quarterback when Vanderbilt’s offense takes the field. The idea to push harder in the film room by learning various defensive schemes came from Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. Spence recalled Kelce comparing the quarterback to a pianist and a tight end keeping the tempo of the pianist. 
“He harps on if you can understand what the defense is doing before they're doing it, and you can be on the same page as your quarterback, you can get a lot of great things done. So that's what we're working on doing, too,” Spence said.
Vanderbilt did not run many actions during the spring in full game simulation of offense versus defense that would take play in a true game, so Spence has not had the opportunity to find out how impactful those film sessions have been in terms of his performance as a pass catcher.
The knowledge he has gained from film watching, however, has shown.
“A lot of this is still kind of in the conversation stage of, we're watching some tape and he's able to point out ‘I think this guy's probably wrong, right?’ or ‘There's a whole void in the defense right there,’ so he’s understanding it,” Vanderbilt tight ends coach Brendan Flaherty told Vandy On SI. “But I mean as a coach, it is exciting to have players that can hold high-level conversations that way.”
Spence has put in the time, effort and preparation into becoming a serious threat down the field. In two short months, he will find out how much fruit the work he put in is going to produce. Perhaps it produces more games like Vanderbilt’s 2025 game against No. 10 LSU, where Spence came away with five catches for 56 yards and a touchdown. Despite that game being his career high in receptions and receiving yards, Spence knows he has more games like that up his sleeve this year and his head coach, Clark Lea, believes so, too.
“He’s really kind of quietly built a productive career and I think we’ll take that center stage this fall,” Lea told Vandy On SI.
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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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