Vanderbilt Football Talked National Title in the Offseason. Now it Meets a Title Contender – Sports Illustrated

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NASHVILLE — Coming off a 10-3 season a year ago, Vanderbilt football did something it never had before. The Commodores won 10 games in a season for the first time in program history. What it also did as a result of that was raise its standards.
Standards that its own fanbase could not have reasonably thought about even last October. The Commodores knocked on the door of the College Football Playoff a season ago and they created an expectation of not just getting to the playoff, but being the last one standing.
“From a team perspective, obviously we want to make the playoffs and go to the natty and win it and also do better than last year,” Vanderbilt EDGE Miles Capers told Vandy On SI in June. “I still want us to get to where we want to go, like the National Championship just to put the icing on top for the world to see. We just have to keep on focusing on the internal and just forget the external.”
The goal of getting to and winning the national championship was set months ago by Capers and the rest of the program. Whatever the people on the outside think of those aspirations does not matter to the people inside.
Despite losing its SEC opener to Auburn last week, the Commodores still believe they have everything in front of them and their schedule shows they will have plenty of opportunities to prove it.
To be the best you have to beat the best. For Vanderbilt to really get to where it wants to go, it has to shut up the outside noise and beat the giants in college football. And it starts this week.
Vanderbilt travels to No. 2 Georgia this weekend for its second game on its conference slate. Georgia head coach Kirby Smart has gotten his program to be among the most feared teams in the sport for nearly the last decade. Georgia has played in either a New Year’s Six Bowl or the College Football Playoff in every season since 2017. That includes back-to-back national titles in 2021 and 2022 and quarterfinal appearances in both seasons of the 12-team playoff format.
The dominance and championship expectations of Georgia has been long-documented. It is a standard that Vanderbilt is trying to get to under head coach Clark Lea. This week’s matchup can serve as a benchmark for where Vanderbilt stacks up with the teams at the level it wants to reach.
Speaking of outside noise, while Vanderbilt may not know the exact point spread for Saturday’s game, it does know it is going into Athens as huge underdogs. But as Lea has conditioned his team to do, the Commodores are not listening to the external, but rather the internal.
“The mindset's just [about] us, man,” Vanderbilt linebacker Bryan Longwell said Tuesday. “We got to do whatever we got to do. I mean, it's just football. 
If you play sound solid and simple, you're gonna win if you don’t make mistakes. You can't make little mistakes, you’ve got to be focused. They're not going to give you anything. They're a good team, too. And we're a good team. So we just got to play solid and just play our game.”
Taking out a team that has national championship expectations like Georgia on its own home field feels perhaps even more impossible than initially thought. Last season, the Bulldogs lost just one game in their home stadium in a September loss to Alabama. That loss a year ago marked the first time Georgia lost a game at Sanford Stadium since Oct. 12, 2019, where a No. 3 Georgia team was stunned by South Carolina in double overtime.
Since that home loss to South Carolina in 2019, Georgia is 40-1 in games played in its home stadium.
It is maybe the steepest climb Vanderbilt will face this season. But if the Commodores want to reach the standard they set for themselves, these are the types of games where they have to at least fight closely, if not, eventually win.
The beginning to Vanderbilt’s season indicates it has a lot of room to grow if it wants to be the 10-2 team it was a season ago and even better than that. But Vanderbilt safety CJ Heard certainly is not giving up on that possibility.
“The sky’s the limit for us, man,” Heard said following Vanderbilt’s win over Delaware Sept. 12. “We really could be the best team that ever played Vanderbilt football. We have so much potential. We just have to keep working, keep standing together and keep going.”
The standard has been set. The focus is clear. It is time to see how Vanderbilt stacks up against the nation’s best of the best this weekend.
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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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