By ROD WILLIAMSON

NASHVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 24, 2025 — I arrived here on the eve of the 1983 football season confident that I knew collegiate athletics. After all, how much different could Vanderbilt be from Iowa State? Plenty as it turns out.

Here is one guy’s opinion, maybe like CliffsNotes, for a better understanding of Vanderbilt University and its Commodores.

There’s the obvious: It’s much harder to get and keep the public’s attention in a metropolitan area like Nashville, of over two million people, and with professional sports franchises, too, than it is in your typical college town. And a private institution isn’t afforded the magnetic default of fan support as is the good old state school. But the differences run more deeply than demographics.

Vanderbilt fans have distinctive characteristics. For starters, Vandy fans are often not from Nashville or even Tennessee. The undergraduate student body is national by design and that produces a scattered alumni base. Rooting for the Commodores is often an acquired taste.

Vandy fans enjoy winning but they prefer it be accomplished the “right” way. Vanderbilt fans believe in the immortal wisdom of Grantland Rice, VU Class of 1901, who penned a poem that once was ubiquitous – even appearing in my Parkersburg, Iowa, High School’s gymnasium: “When the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He writes not if you won or lost but how you played the Game.” 

Every Vanderbilt student lives by the university’s own Honor Code with the moral that it’s better to flunk the mathematics test than the honesty test. Vanderbilt wants to win with genuine student-athletes, good sportsmanship and class. It’s not a win-at-all-costs bunch, which is why some fans were embarrassed by the post-Heisman Trophy social media gaffe by its star quarterback, Diego Pavia.

The University of Iowa has its share of writing stars but many current national sports media influencers are Vanderbilt graduates, the result of a prime scholarship for promising sportswriters that is awarded annually. This list includes Buster Olney and Skip Bayless (ESPN), Dave Sheinin (Washington Post), Lee Jenkins and Mark Bechtel (Sports Illustrated), Tyler Kepner (New York Times), Willie Geist (NBC), Dan Wolken (USA Today), Mitch Light (The Athletic), and Andrew Maraniss (New York Times best-selling author), to name a handful.  Not bad for a school with no journalism department.

Vanderbilt takes enormous pride in its academics, annually ranking among the Top 15 colleges and universities. If it ever came to choosing between big-time athletics or academics, you wouldn’t need an election. Adios sports. Over the years, various Vanderbilt chancellors (the school does not have a president) have been indifferent toward athletics and the result was an under-funded department with substandard facilities (compared to its Southeastern Conference brethren).

In 2003, the flamboyant chancellor E. Gordon Gee gained national attention when he “abolished” the athletic department. My mom back home in Iowa called me that night, worried that I had just lost my job. The Vandy athletic director was fired, but for the most part, the rest of the department carried on under new campus leadership. It created many questions and in hindsight, offered few answers.

Suggestions that we get tossed out of the SEC and join the Ivy League were commonplace — faulty reasoning that only considered football struggles. Since Vanderbilt is a charter member of the SEC, dating back to 1933, that was not going to happen. While we didn’t contribute much to SEC gridiron glory, we offered the league academic integrity, a rock-solid rules compliant example and, quite often, excellent Olympic sports. Vanderbilt has won three NCAA team championships in bowling, two in baseball and one in women’s tennis.

So what has happened to produce such across-the-board athletic success in recent years?

Daniel Diermeier’s arrival as chancellor in 2020 was impactful. A native-born German with a passion for the English Premier League, he is, perhaps, the first genuine sports fan to head the university.

He injected needed financial resources into athletics; the building crane has become the unofficial department bird. FirstBank Stadium (formerly Vanderbilt Stadium/McGugin Field) underwent a snazzy enhancement and with a capacity of 33,000, the sparkling result produces tight tickets and a magnificent show. The 2025 season was sold-out.

Nearly every Vanderbilt program (17 in total) has new or enhanced facilities.

Diermeier promoted Dr. Candice Storey Lee into the athletic director’s chair. Lee, a former Vandy basketball player, holds three degrees from Vanderbilt and spent nearly 20 years in its athletic trenches. Lee has made marvelous coaching hires and shares Diermeier’s vision. She was named the Athletic Director of the Year for 2024-25 by the national association of collegiate ADs.

One of Lee’s high-profile hires was football’s head coach Clark Lea, a former Vanderbilt fullback who came “home” after serving as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator. Lea’s 10-2 worksheet in 2025 was the best season in school history and he has been honored by several organizations as the National Coach of the Year.

Vanderbilt enters the Dec. 31 ReliaQuest Bowl, against the Iowa Hawkeyes, with momentum. The nation’s top-ranked high school quarterback de-committed from Georgia and signed with the ’Dores. Both basketball teams are undefeated and ranked as of this writing. Baseball is a perennial power, soccer just won the SEC title, golf, tennis and bowling teams are national contenders.

It’s been good to be gold!

The author of this guest column Rod Williamson is a native of Parkersburg, Iowa, and a graduate of Iowa State University.  He began his career working in sports information at the University of Northern Iowa and Iowa State U, before spending 33 years as chief spokesperson for athletics at Vanderbilt.  You can comment on this story in the handy form below, or you can correspond directly with Williamson by email at rodwilliamson72@gmail.com.