College football fans love to make celebratory gestures with their fingers: V for victory, thumbs-up, a clenched fist raised high. I went to Vanderbilt, so what I do when watching their games on TV is different. Using three digits on each hand, I overlap them to form a crosshatched eye shield. You can’t see much this way, which is good, since something usually goes wrong. I call it the Looming Disaster Viewmaster.
If this sounds strange, it means you didn’t go to Vanderbilt or haven’t followed the team independently from afar. Why would you? Historically, the Commodores have been bad, in a pattern that dates back to the 1940s.
This year, so far, is different. Vanderbilt is 6–1 and coming off a big win against LSU. They’re about to host the 15th-ranked Missouri Tigers in an SEC contest that College GameDay has picked for its weekly hullaballoo. For the first time since 1947, they’re ranked in the top 10. Among other strengths, they have a star quarterback, Diego Pavia; a great coach, Clark Lea; a wizard offensive coordinator, Tim Beck; and an innovative athletic director, Candice Storey Lee. Together, the team has created a flash of magic that’s being noticed all over the country.
Awesome, but as any longtime fan knows, good times are bad because they’re always followed by new bad times. That 10th-ranked team from 1947? They finished unranked and in the middle of the SEC pack. The 1948 season was nice (8–2–1, ranked 12th!), and there were some OK years in the fifties, but by 1960 the team was almost always embarrassing. Reasons for this have included a reluctance by administrators to place too much emphasis on sports at a school with high academic standards, and Vanderbilt’s small size compared to other SEC campuses.
But hey, what about 1974, when the Commodores, led by head coach Steve Sloan and defensive co-coordinator Bill Parcells, went 7–3–2 and played in the Peach Bowl? They both left immediately—for jobs with the team they played in the Peach Bowl—and Sloan was replaced by the hapless Fred Pancoast, who posted a 13–31 record over four seasons.
That was the start of a few-brightspots era that lasted until 2008, when Vanderbilt made it to 5–0 with an impressive win over Auburn. But then they started losing again and limped to 6–6. How about the 2011–2013 years under James Franklin? Memorable, with two 9–4 seasons. But that ended in tears when he scurried off to Penn State like a thief in the night.
My friend Tom Jurkovich, a Nashville native and Vanderbilt grad, knows better than most that the rare good times must be balanced with worry. In a text sent after the LSU game, he described his special anti-jinx methods.
“The sense around town beforehand was that the ’Dores would surely win,” he said. “That is, to say the least, a highly unusual vibe when playing a top opponent. Made me uncomfortable as a longtime fan occasionally prone to superstitious behavior. I prefer the under-promise, over-deliver, reverse-psychology, surpress-all-optimism approach to Vanderbilt football watching.”
Tom and I were at Vandy together in the late 1970s, during the Golden Age of Lame. We worked on the school newspaper, The Hustler, and though I didn’t cover sports, I clearly recall the sight of the game-coverage guys slumping back to the office after the latest loss, obliged to crank out a story nobody wanted to read.
As Tom reported, confidence is higher now, which I confirmed by checking in with students who cover the team: sophomore Dylan Tovitz, deputy sports editor of The Hustler, and freshman Mikey Andersen, who will be part of a two-person crew broadcasting the Missouri game for VandyRadio. Both knew about the despair of yore, but defeatism is harder for them to understand. This year’s team has people on campus excited, they said, and you feel it.
“It’s been one of the cooler things, frankly,” said Tovitz. “When I was applying to Vanderbilt, the one thing I was unsure of was whether the student body was always going to leave football games in the second quarter to go to Broadway.” (Broadway means Nashville’s Lower Broadway, where you go to get drunk and forget.)
Andersen agreed. “Juniors and seniors will tell you that they’ve gone from disassociating from the team to wanting to post about it on social media,” he said. “The main thing I’ve noticed is people taking pride. It still feels new.”
I also spoke with the Voice of the Commodores, broadcaster Andrew Allegretta, who understood why I live in fear and tried to help me feel better. One member of his crew—Norman Jordan, who played for Vanderbilt in the early eighties—had trouble trusting that the team would actually hold on against LSU.
“We go to a two-minute timeout, Vanderbilt has the ball, and LSU doesn’t have any timeouts left,” Allegretta said. “Mathematically it’s over. Norman is over there going: I don’t know. We’ll see how it plays out.”
I feel you, Norman! But I’m also psyched. Things could still go off the rails—after Mizzou, Vanderbilt has to play Texas, Auburn, Kentucky, and Tennessee—but whatever happens, I’ll be watching. No hands.
