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NASHVILLE — Just beyond the south side of Vanderbilt's bleachers, a few feet of brick stand as a symbol of hope. Memorial Gymnasium, home to the Commodores' basketball team, is where excitement is expected to return. Under head coach Mark Byington, the program has gone toe-to-toe with some of the nation's elite and is poised for another strong campaign.
Preseason All-American Tyler Tanner will soon take the floor, aiming to lead Vanderbilt to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament and build on a 27-win 2025-26 season. The Commodores are a consensus top-25 team in the preseason, and Byington's third squad—with its fun, exciting style and nearly complete roster—is expected to generate signature wins. The first home exhibition game is just hours away.
Meanwhile, Vanderbilt football is stuck in a fourth-quarter drive that feels pointless, with Arkansas having already sealed the outcome. It's easy to long for what's likely to come in that gym, especially since the promise of basketball isn't materializing on this fall Saturday at FirstBank Stadium—and hasn't for weeks.
This football team declared it would be everything Byington's team will be, but it's far from that. Instead of a national championship contender or one of the best teams in recent memory, Vanderbilt sits in last place in the SEC and has no remaining game in which it will be favored. It may not have more than a game or two where it's less than a 10-point underdog. For all intents and purposes, this is a dead football team walking.
Players say they aren't throwing in the towel, that they're getting closer and have all the pieces to win, but human nature must be kicking in. In press conferences, they appear demoralized, obligated to put on a brave face. This used to be fun around here; now it isn't.
Vanderbilt stood at a crossroads entering Saturday. A win would have made it plausible to sell hope—a winning record and a narrative that a brutal three-week stretch against Georgia and Auburn on the road and Ole Miss at home explained recent struggles. It could have claimed it was a few wins from bowl eligibility and taken a victory lap for its resilience after a blowout loss to Ole Miss. Now that it's lost, all that is off the table.
So are this group's aspirations of making a bowl game and the narrative that it's getting closer to being the team it wants to be. The wheels are falling off, and Vanderbilt must know it. It just lost the easiest remaining game on its schedule and faces serious odds of a winless SEC season—something it believed it was well beyond at this stage of the build.
Vanderbilt has now lost four games in a row, each worse than the last. That's how you get quotes like these: "It hurts," linebacker Bryan Longwell said. "We have to clean our game up, we have to protect the ball and if we don't do those things we're not going to win games," head coach Clark Lea said. "We can't be surprised when we don't do them and we lose. We can't be so entitled to this that we somehow feel like we were robbed tonight, because we weren't."
Lea and company have had chances to prove they are what they said they'd be, but they clearly aren't. Seven games in, they've proven what they are. Five games remain, but it feels silly to expect much. As a result, Byington's program feels like a reprieve for the athletic department—a sanctuary of sanity where it can find evidence that its investment is paying off.
That's how the department and fanbase generally operate this time of year, but they haven't the past two. Everyone around here typically awaits basketball and gets hopes up because of football disappointment. Now, they're back to their old form. At least, it's hard for them not to be.
While Lea's group promises better performance down the stretch, it's hard to believe them. They've said the same things for months and failed to deliver every time since their Week 3 miracle win over NC State. Wasting energy believing they're set to turn the corner feels like a fool's errand. But there's probably a better place to direct it—a place where a deep NCAA Tournament run feels plausible, where the team's best player has already proven to be a star, where he has a sound supporting cast and a coach who appears to be one of the best in his sport, and where there's little doubt this group will be an abject failure like this football team appears to be becoming.
Lea doesn't believe his group will give up and believes it hasn't yet, but it may have missed its opportunity to keep the spotlight beyond Vanderbilt basketball's Monday-night exhibition against UAB.