NASHVILLE — Earlier this summer, Australian Football League coach Damien Hardwick stumbled across the Netflix series, “Any Given Saturday,” which followed SEC teams throughout the 2024 season.

Hardwick, coach of the Gold Coast Suns in Queensland, was fascinated while watching the third episode, “Shock the World,” which documented Vanderbilt‘s 40-35 upset of then-No. 1 Alabama on Oct. 5, 2024.

It was the Commodores’ first victory over a No. 1-ranked team and their first over the Crimson Tide in 40 years.

Led by an undersized, fiery quarterback and a coaching staff convinced it could take on the world, Vanderbilt flipped the script from being the SEC’s perennial punching bag to world beaters.

“The club I’m at now is very, very similar,” Hardwick said. “A bit of a laughingstock, a bit of a joke. People used to come to our place for a holiday.”

The Gold Coast Suns, an expansion team that joined the AFL in 2009, had never captured a final series berth in their 16-year history until this past season. Hardwick was so impressed by Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea and the culture he built that he and four of his assistants took a 22-hour flight to the United States and spent two days with the Commodores this week.

“He’s a connector,” Hardwick said of Lea. “We were fortunate enough to sit in his meeting, and I felt like running through a brick wall for him with the way he goes about it. He’s just a very smart operator. The way he gets his people to do great things is what makes a great coach, and that’s the reason I think they’re having success.”

Lea and quarterback Diego Pavia are two big reasons for Vanderbilt’s success, but they aren’t the only people behind its sudden transformation from SEC also-ran to legitimate College Football Playoff contender.

Heading into Saturday’s game at No. 20 Texas (noon ET, ABC), the Commodores are 7-1 for the first time since 1941 and No. 9 in the AP poll, their highest ranking since they were seventh for one week in 1937.

According to Lea, chancellor Daniel Diermeier and athletic director Candice Storey Lee deserve just as much credit as the players and coaches for providing the financial resources and other support that previously wasn’t there for the football team at one of the country’s most highly regarded academic institutions.

“Vanderbilt’s never cared about this program,” said Lea, a Vanderbilt fullback from 2002 to 2004. “Well, I shouldn’t say never because of some of the records that we’re breaking right now, so maybe back in the 1940s or whatever. But there’s never been a time where it was like, ‘Hey, we’re going to be really good at this, and we’re going to do the things we need.’

“In fact, if anything, I think there’s been almost a resistance to that for fear that it cuts against a narrative that we’re an elite academic institution. What our chancellor understands now is that this is the front porch.”

Diermeier, who was named Vanderbilt’s ninth chancellor in July 2020, is a most unlikely college football fan. He grew up in West Berlin, Germany, during the Cold War. He was a sports fan as a child, watching Olympic wrestling and World Cup soccer on TV. He was the first person in his family to attend college and went to USC as an international student in 1988.

Diermeier spoke fairly fluent English but didn’t know much about the sports metaphors that are a part of American vernacular. Someone in the USC language lab suggested he watch sports on TV to learn about phrases such as “got the ball across the goal line” and “hit a home run.”

Diermeier wasn’t familiar with baseball or American football but decided to follow the sports anyway. The first baseball game he watched was Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, in which Dodgers pinch-hitter Kirk Gibson smacked a walk-off, two-run homer against A’s closer Dennis Eckersley and famously hobbled around the bases in the ninth inning of a 5-4 victory.

That same year, No. 2 USC, led by star quarterback Rodney Peete, defeated No. 6 UCLA 31-22 in the Rose Bowl to improve to 10-0. USC lost to No. 1 Notre Dame 27-10 in its regular-season finale, knocking it out of the national championship hunt.

“The whole campus was crazy,” Diermeier recalled. “There was Rodney Peete versus [UCLA quarterback] Troy Aikman. It was fantastic, and I just loved it. I saw what college athletics can do for a community. It was a very powerful experience.”

After earning a PhD in political science at the University of Rochester, Diermeier’s academic career ascended from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business to Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management to the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, where he also served as provost.

The football programs at Stanford and Northwestern were similar to Vanderbilt’s — they were trying to be competitive at high-academic institutions. They enjoyed stretches of being good but largely have struggled.

“People told me, ‘Yeah, you have seen the Big Ten and you have seen the Pac-12, [but] you have not seen the SEC and that’s a different game,'” Diermeier said. “They were right, and so it became very quickly clear that this is a different level of intensity, a different level of passion, and that we had not performed on that level.”

The Commodores went 0-9 in Diermeier’s first season on campus during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Vanderbilt fired coach Derek Mason, whose teams went 27-55 in seven seasons, and replaced him with Lea, who had been Notre Dame‘s defensive coordinator for three seasons.

It wasn’t like the Commodores had never won in the 21st century. Lea’s coach at Vanderbilt, Bobby Johnson, had some success, guiding the Commodores to a 7-6 record and bowl victory in 2008. James Franklin pulled off what had seemed impossible, directing Vandy to back-to-back 9-4 campaigns in 2012 and 2013.

But a criminal case involving four football players accused of raping and sodomizing an unconscious 21-year-old female student in a dorm room hung a dark cloud over the program. Three of the four players were convicted; the fourth reached a plea deal with prosecutors.

“Unfortunately, [Franklin] left in a manner that wasn’t great [because] you had this rape trial that really was a black eye for the program,” Lea said. “And so that stretch of success was kind of almost wiped away.”

Lea didn’t have immediate success at his alma mater. The Commodores went 2-10 in 2021 and improved to 5-7 the next season. After going 2-10 again in 2023, Lea knew things had to change dramatically if Vanderbilt was ever going to be good.

After losing All-SEC offensive tackle Tyler Steen to Alabama following the 2021 season and 1,000-yard rusher Ray Davis to Kentucky the next season, Lea realized the Commodores couldn’t be competitive in the SEC unless they took more seasoned players from the transfer portal and became more competitive in name, image and likeness payouts.

After going 9-27 in his first three seasons, Lea told his athletic director that if the school couldn’t find $3 million in donations before the transfer portal opened in December 2023, Vanderbilt wouldn’t have a program.

Lee secured $6 million in NIL contributions in one week, according to Lea.

“She knew what was going on here,” Lea said. “We’ve never been disorganized. It’s always been purposeful and intentional. But it’s so easy when things don’t go well to blame the team. It’s so easy when things don’t go well to blame the coach. She was such a partner and wanted to solve the problem. In that one week, she never flinched.”

That money helped the Commodores land New Mexico State transfers Pavia and star tight end Eli Stowers after Lea hired then-Aggies coach Jerry Kill as his chief consultant and senior offensive advisor. Lea also brought in New Mexico State offensive coordinator Tim Beck and three other assistants to help turn things around.

When Vanderbilt general manager Barton Simmons talked to Pavia for the first time, the former junior college quarterback who didn’t have a single FBS or FCS scholarship offer coming out of high school, told him: “Just tell Coach Lea if he brings me here, we’re gonna win every f—ing game we play.”

“It didn’t feel like bulls—, and it felt authentic,” Simmons said. “He wasn’t saying it in an impulsive way. It was almost like he was expressing his belief.”

The Commodores haven’t won every game with Pavia under center, but they’ve won more than most people would have believed. He’s among the Heisman Trophy favorites after passing for 1,698 yards with 15 touchdowns and leading the team in rushing with 458 yards and five scores.

Lea said Pavia has brought much more to the Commodores than his production.

“There’s only so much I can do as head coach to establish leadership in the program,” Lea said. “What I’ve learned through Diego is, first of all, there’s no one more important on the team than the quarterback. And second, you can’t manufacture alpha leadership, but once you have an alpha leader, that attitude can spread throughout.”

Simmons, a former recruiting analyst for Rivals.com and 247Sports, was one of Lea’s football teammates at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville. They won two state titles together. Simmons was a defensive back at Yale, while Lea went to play baseball at Birmingham Southern before transferring to Vanderbilt.

Simmons was among Lea’s first hires, putting him in charge of personnel and roster development, while assisting in recruiting and scouting.

A former SEC defensive coordinator told ESPN that the Commodores have done a remarkable job of evaluating transfers, especially in the trenches. All five of their starting offensive linemen are graduate transfers or seniors from other schools. The top three reserves also are transfers.

The Vanderbilt coaching staff’s message to potential recruits and transfers is clear: “If you’re coming here, this is going to be really, really hard because you’re playing in the best conference in college football,” Simmons said. “We’re going to hold you to the highest standards in college football. And you’re going to have to go to class during the week next to some of the smartest people in the world.”

While Diermeier has helped by securing athletes priority registration for classes to keep practice times open and creating more slots for graduate transfers, Vanderbilt’s academic requirements and expectations haven’t wavered.

“We say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that we compete with Harvard Monday to Friday and with Alabama on Saturday,” Diermeier said.

Lee wasn’t done in getting her football coach what he needed, either. The ongoing Vandy United campaign has raised more than $350 million to improve athletics facilities and the student-athlete experience.

The new south end at FirstBank Stadium includes a multiuse, 130,000 square foot facility with a new football locker room, premium seating, dining facility and renovated concourse.

A previously completed north end zone project included a new videoboard, premium seating and a basketball practice facility.

Lea hopes the football investments aren’t over. He wants a stand-alone football operations building and indoor practice facility. Lea said the current weight room doesn’t allow his entire team to work out together.

The university provided $100 million to the campaign fund to get it off the ground.

“It’s essential to have alignment from the very top,” Lee said. “So in order for me to execute the vision, I do have to have support and someone in our chancellor who wants to be bold, who’s not beholden to the past, who doesn’t care about what the history was. [Diermeier] said from the very beginning that there would be no daylight between us, and he would support the vision that I had.”

With the changing landscape in college athletics, Lee realized Vanderbilt was in danger of being left behind if hefty investments weren’t made.

“The past has kind of always hung over us,” Lee said. “We’ve had these moments of success, but they’ve been fleeting. We don’t want to just experience success in a moment, right? We want to be able to sustain excellence, and that’s what this university expects across the board.”

Diermeier, a former business school professor, put it another way, comparing the rapidly evolving world of college sports to the deregulation of U.S. airlines in 1978.

“I want to be Southwest,” he said. “I don’t want to be Pan Am.”

Lee has deep roots at Vanderbilt. She was a captain of the women’s basketball team in 2002 and earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees there. She became the school’s first female athletic director and the first Black woman to lead an SEC athletic department in 2020.

While some have suggested that she and Lea have grand visions for Vanderbilt football only because they went to school there, she says that’s not the case.

“I mean, we are both alums and so we care deeply for this place, but it’s not just that,” she said. “It’s not just an emotional connection, and we do have that, but it is also because we are fierce competitors that deeply believe that this can become something great.”

While Lea once feared NIL and the transfer portal would leave the Commodores behind, he now calls their presence the great disruptor. It has leveled the playing field for schools like Vanderbilt, Indiana and Georgia Tech, if the right financial resources are in place.

“We’ve become a really attractive place because this is also different,” Lea said. “People are inspired by the idea of building something and not inheriting something.”

Nebraska has signed coach Matt Rhule to a two-year contract extension that will take him through the 2032 season, the school announced Thursday.

The extension includes an increase in Rhule’s buyout this season to $15 million from $5 million, which would effectively eliminate him from taking another job in this cycle.

Rhule and his family’s happiness at Nebraska, where he’s in his third year as head coach, was the primary driver behind him agreeing to a new deal, per ESPN sources. Nebraska is 6-2 this season, and Rhule led the program to its first bowl game since 2016 last year. He has spoken frequently about the potential of the Nebraska program.

“The University of Nebraska, the city of Lincoln and the state of Nebraska are special. It is a place our family is proud to call home,” Rhule said in a statement. “We have outstanding leadership from [Nebraska president] Dr. [Jeffrey P.] Gold and [athletic director] Troy Dannen, and I appreciate the support and confidence they have shown in our staff. Our focus remains on building Nebraska Football into a perennial championship contender.”

Rhule had been frequently been linked to the open job at his alma mater, Penn State. And this extension essentially takes another prominent name out of contention for the eight power conference jobs that have opened so far this year.

The new deal does not include any change in base compensation. It does offer the additional incentive for base salary if Nebraska reaches the College Football Playoff. There’s an innovative new clause in the deal that states every time Nebraska qualifies for the CFP, Rhule’s base salary for each year on the deal increases by $1 million.

Rhule’s salary throughout the course of the deal has an AAV of more than $11.7 million (including retention bonuses). That number puts him in the highest echelon of college coaches over the course of the deal.

Rhule’s two additional years are at $12.5 million, the same as the final year of his current deal in 2030. The deal remains 90% guaranteed.

This season, Rhule is currently in the top 15 in salary at $8.5 million. Prior to the extension, the deal included significant escalators in the contract, as in 2027, he’ll make $11 million (with retention bonus).

The new deal comes at a time when Nebraska is trending toward the program’s best season in nearly a decade, as Nebraska hasn’t reached back-to-back bowls since 2016. That 9-4 season under Mike Riley is also the last year the Cornhuskers won more than eight games in a year.

“Coach Rhule has shown he is the right leader at the right time for Nebraska Football. We look forward to him and his family being in Lincoln for a long time,” Dannen said in a statement. “Our program has seen significant progress under Matt’s leadership, and at this stage in the evolution of the program continuity and stability are critical. I welcome the opportunity to continue to partner with Matt and his staff to build a program that will make everyone associated with Nebraska Football proud. Go Big Red!”

Nebraska hired Rhule in November 2022 after five consecutive losing seasons under Scott Frost. Rhule had been fired earlier in the year by the Carolina Panthers, but he brought a strong track record as a college coach and program builder at both Temple and Baylor.

While Trev Alberts hired Rhule to replace Scott Frost following the 2022 season, Rhule agreed to the extension under second-year athletic director Troy Dannen.

Rhule’s track record includes an American Athletic Conference title at Temple in 2016 and a wholesale rebuild at Baylor that included a Sugar Bowl appearance after the 2019 season.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas quarterback Arch Manning was “making good progress” in practice, coach Steve Sarkisian said Thursday, but his status to return from a concussion in time to play against No. 9 Vanderbilt was still uncertain.

Manning has been in concussion protocol since being injured at the beginning of overtime in No. 20 Texas’ 45-38 win over Mississippi State last week. Backup Matthew Caldwell came on to throw the winning touchdown as Texas rallied from 17 points down in the fourth quarter.

Manning has spent the week in Texas’ concussion protocol and he returned to practice Wednesday. He was listed as questionable on the team’s Wednesday night injury report to the Southeastern Conference.

“I don’t have anything beyond for Arch just because we have to follow the protocol of the days and the reps, but he’s making good progress,” Sarkisian said.

If Manning can’t play, Caldwell will start. He is a graduate transfer from Troy.

“We haven’t changed anything that we’ve done,” Sarkisian said. “The game plan is the game plan. All of his teammates have confidence in Matt if it’s his time to go.”

Manning has passed for 1,795 yards and 15 touchdowns. A preseason favorite for the Heisman Trophy, Manning struggled for much of the early season but played his best game against Mississippi State with 346 yards passing and three touchdowns. He passed for 169 yards in the final quarter.