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Dave Wilson
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Dave Wilson
ESPN Staff Writer
- Dave Wilson is an editor for ESPN.com since 2010. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Sun.
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Ryan McGee
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Ryan McGee
ESPN Senior Writer
- Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com
- 2-time Sports Emmy winner
- 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year
ON A WARM September night last year, after a 27-10 UCF win over Georgia Tech, the crowd hung around to see something that only happens at the Bounce House.
Shortly after the game ended, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center, about 35 miles due east from campus in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at NASA’s Launch Complex 39A.
Fans in the stadium got a perfect view of the launch because, by design, UCF’s 50-yard-line sits on the same latitude as the launch pad. As Elton John’s “Rocket Man” played over the stadium speakers, the video board showed a close-up of the spacecraft as it left the Earth’s atmosphere, with fans cheering along. Just another day at SpaceU.
UCF is all-in on space. Founded in 1963 as Florida Technological University with the motto “Reach For The Stars,” it opened in 1968 with an emphasis on providing talent for America’s ambitious space program. Now, with UCF grads making up about 30% of all Kennedy Space Center employees, the university is proudly touting its space connections.
To celebrate that legacy, the football team has played a wildly popular “Space Game” every year since 2017, featuring alternate uniforms with their own distinct color — called Canaveral Blue to reflect the coastal skies and water — and a small nod to the school’s original mascot, the Citronaut, a Florida orange wearing a space suit. It’s one of the coolest modern traditions in college football.
But it did raise the eyebrows of a new conference foe.
“Some blue unis … Some Space City thing,” Houston coach Dana Holgorsen said last week during his radio show. “I thought we were Space City.”
Houston, which is playing its first season in the Big 12 alongside UCF, represents a city that has long taken pride in its role as NASA’s nerve center at Johnson Space Center. Around the same time that UCF was being constructed, Houston was building the Astrodome, home to the Astros and another newfangled invention, Astroturf. (The Houston Rockets were actually named while the franchise was based in San Diego, oddly enough.)
So you’ll forgive Holgorsen if he needs to be educated when he’s told that UCF’s claim as a space hub is due to its proximity to NASA’s Launch Control Center, when Houston is home to Mission Control, the site of one of the most famous lines in the history of the space race.
“They don’t say ‘Orlando, we’ve got a problem,'” Holgorsen said.
With the upcoming departures of Texas and Oklahoma, two of the most storied teams in college football, the Big 12 is desperately in need of some new squabbles. Arizona and Arizona State will arrive next year with the Territorial Cup on the line. BYU, a new addition this year, will reunite with Utah next year in a rivalry that’s been played 101 times.
But while UCF and Houston might not ever become a heated rivalry due to their geographic separation on Earth, there’s a whole other frontier in the heavens. There is real school pride at stake. UCF fans are still rolling their eyes over the short-lived so-called “Civil ConFLiCT” that was forced upon them by UConn and essentially ended when the trophy went missing after two games.
While Houston and UCF have played each other 10 times, none before 2005, this one means something due to their connective tissue with the space program, not to mention they’re now conference opponents.
“We’re embracing it now,” UCF coach Gus Malzahn said earlier this year. “Every one of our roads on campus is named after a galaxy. The first month I got the job, I actually spoke to NASA on leadership and they had me Zoomed in to both groups [in Florida and Texas].”
And the eye in the sky is watching them as well.
“NASA has Space Act agreements with both schools,” said Wayne Saxer, the agency’s lead for sports engagement. “We work collaboratively with universities nationwide that bring innovative solutions and fresh perspectives to some of our biggest challenges.”
To celebrate both schools’ roles supporting America’s space agency, NASA flew a newly minted medallion featuring the logos of each school on opposing sides on CRS-29, a SpaceX mission to the International Space Station a couple of months ago.
Launched from Florida, guided by Houston, the medallion will come back to Earth, where it will be framed and presented to the winning team.
Welcome to the Space Wars.
THE TENSION BETWEEN the folks in Houston and Orlando nearly predates the cities themselves. It reaches back almost a century before the United States entered space with the launch of the Explorer I satellite on February 1, 1958, from Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 26.
In 1865, Jules Verne published “From the Earth to the Moon”, a tale of post-Civil War Americans who construct a spacecraft and launching device to fling a trio of travelers off this mortal coil and toward our nearest celestial neighbor. The French novelist was renowned for his imagination, but also for the research that kept his stories rooted in fact. He always included just the right amount of actual science to make his fantastical fiction seem plausible.
The book’s 10th chapter is titled “Florida and Texas.” Why? Because Verne predicted that the best location for a launch site would be between the equator and the 28th parallel, keeping it best in line with the Moon’s orbital path. Plus, the launch site would need to be built alongside a large body of water, so that debris wouldn’t fall into populated areas in the case of an accident.
With all that in mind, Verne writes about sparring would-be locations in Galveston Bay and “Tampa Town,” complete with lobbying of the government to land the launch pad, protests and rallies in the streets and barbs publicly traded between the two states.
Verne imagined Florida newspapers writing of Texas: “A fine bay; half-choked with sand!” And Texas responding: “Choked yourselves!”
Everything Verne wrote from his home in northern France became a reality nearly 100 years later and 5,000 miles away. NASA was founded after that Explorer I launch and established its primary launch location at the Cape, where the first version of Mission Control was housed in bunkers around the spaceport.
“It was basically a bunch of monitors and microphones in a pillbox,” John Glenn, an original seven Mercury astronaut-turned-U.S. Senator, recalled in 2014. “When we were assigned to CapCom, to talk to our colleague inside the spacecraft, to be in there at the Cape and feel those rockets going up right there and then in front of you, it was remarkable on every level. But it was cramped for space. And yes, I realize the irony of using that word just now.”
On Sept. 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy doubled down on a challenge that he had first pitched to a joint session of Congress one year earlier, that an American should set foot on the Moon before decade’s end. He said those words — in Houston — while standing on the field at Rice Stadium, famously adding: “But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Once Kennedy announced his moonshot, a literal overnight fight began regarding the location of NASA’s new HQ, the spot for Mission Control. Those already living in Florida believed it should stay there — NASA could simply construct some new buildings — but they found themselves battling dozens of cities for NASA’s favor. Cities from St. Louis to Langley, Virginia, to San Francisco to Shreveport, Louisiana, submitted HQ proposals.
“My favorite was Bogalusa, Louisiana,” says Rick Houston, NASCAR sportswriter-turned-NASA historian and co-author of “Go, Flight! The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control.” “Can you imagine that one? ‘Bogalusa, we’ve have a problem.'”
As part of the region’s push to prove its worthiness, Florida governor Farris Bryant signed into law Senate Bill No. 125, creating a new state university in east central Florida with the goal of supporting the Cape. The school was named Florida Tech, and though it had no sports teams yet, it did have a mascot, a helmet-wearing Jetsons-inspired spaceman with a Florida orange for a body. They called him the Citronaut.
“I love the Citronaut,” confesses Tennessee athletic director Danny White, who served in the same capacity at the school Florida Tech became, UCF, from 2015 to 2021. White, who moved his office into the football stadium where he could watch rocket launches going up from the Cape, greenlit the Citronaut’s return for UCF’s first Space Games in 2018 and ’19. “The instant you see him, you feel like you’re back in the 1960’s Space Age.”
The end result was a punt. Launch operations would remain at the Cape and with it Launch Control at Kennedy Space Center. But that setup didn’t last for long. Beginning with the Gemini 4 flight of June 1965, communication and control shifted to Mission Control, located on the seemingly endless grounds of Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas, directly in between Houston and Jules Verne’s Galveston Bay. What made the shift happen? A lot of, well, space that was handed to NASA for free via a donation by the same school where JFK’s speech is still memorialized on a plaque that hangs in the stadium where JT Daniels will spend his weekend fighting for a sixth win and bowl eligibility against Florida Atlantic.
“I mean, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade here, but if we are talking about space schools, then there’s really one, right?” astronaut Shannon Walker half-joked earlier this year. Walker is a Houston native who has spent 330 days in orbit and holds three degrees from Rice, one of the school’s 13 astronauts. “Go Owls.”
When asked if there is still beef between the Cape and Houston about the decision to move Mission Control west, Rick Houston audibly huffs. “When I was working on my book and interviewing all of the NASA legends, the Florida guys all said the same thing to me. ‘Now, when are you going to write a book about the real Mission Control?'”
HOUSTON, OF COURSE, has a problem with this.
For more than 50 years, the university system has partnered with NASA, including creating a campus in Clear Lake adjacent to Johnson Space Center since its opening in 1961 “to meet a vital demand for trained engineers, physicists and mathematicians to join the U.S. space program,” according to the university.
Last year, Houston chancellor Renu Khator signed an extension with NASA for all the system’s universities to extend a partnership to “advance human spaceflight.”
“Houston is ‘Space City,’ so it’s important for students and faculty in relevant disciplines across the UH system to have opportunities to engage in and be exposed to real-world space flight-related research and technology development with NASA,” Khator said.
Dr. Olga Bannova, formerly an architect in Moscow, is the director of Houston’s Sasakawa Center for Space Architecture, the only master’s level program of its kind in the world.
“It’s obviously about human spaceflight, but also about psychology,” Dr. Bannova said. “It’s about understanding human needs and providing and thinking about the ways how we can make a human life not only sustainable in space, but also really rewarding, you know?”
One of those ways, Bannova says, is to provide “a complementary countermeasure against all these negative effects on the human physiology and psychology that’s associated with microgravity conditions.”
For those of us who don’t speak scientist, basically that means one component is the possibility of sports in space.
Adam Doll, one of Bannova’s graduate students, is already an engineer for NASA in Houston who does astronaut training and when he’s not pondering spacesuit development, is working on his master’s thesis on the idea of collaborative sports in some interstellar habitat. Nothing too rowdy. Think a collaborative rock climbing-type course with an objective to complete it as fast as possible. Not a future Cougars-Knights battle in the cosmos.
“You don’t want the games to get too competitive in space,” Doll said.
But down here, it’s all fair game.
“I don’t even know where UCF is, to be honest. And we have the astronauts in Houston,” Doll said. “That’s a big thing. They live here and train here. They just go out there [to Florida] to launch. I mean, they only use that every once in a while. Mission Control is manned 24/7. We always have people monitoring the space station.”
That would explain why legendary NASA flight director Gene Kranz, who oversaw the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, including the first moon landing (and was portrayed by Ed Harris in “Apollo 13”), said the Florida-Texas grandstanding has evolved over the years.
“That may be a current-day rivalry, but that was not the case back through the programs that I supported,” Kranz, who is 90 and lives near Houston, said. “I think it may have come about once we started putting astronauts as center directors down at the Cape.”
No matter which side you’re on, the Knights are way ahead in embracing the SpaceU moniker. Every single sport at UCF has an alternate SpaceU/Citronauts jersey. And it’s good for business.
“Every year, people want to see when the first game is and then when the Space Game is,” said Jimmy Skiles, one of the senior athletic directors at UCF and the chief branding officer. “It’s become just this whole event in itself. I think we are the only college fan base in the country that is willing to accept an alternate mascot and alternate color and even an alternate name for the university — SpaceU — for a single game.”
It’s evident annually, seeing a split fan base wearing black and gold and another huge section of the stadium wearing blue, such as during the 45-3 upset of Oklahoma State two weeks ago.
“That’s never been one of our colors,” Skiles said. “It’s a color we created as part of our space brand. And yet we had 25,000 people wearing Canaveral Blue.” Skiles said eight of their top 10 best-selling merchandise items each year are all space-related.
The other thing fans love about the Space Game? UCF dominates every time. This year, a 4-5 UCF team that had just one Big 12 win crushed No. 15 OSU, moving to 7-0 all time in Space Games with a 202-point margin of victory. Fans switch from “Go Knights!” to “Go ‘Nauts!” for the annual event. It’s almost enough to start an identity crisis.
can ‘Naut lose
+202 point differential all-time in Space Games pic.twitter.com/MtdLIR5Kk5
— UCF Football (@UCF_Football) November 12, 2023
“Our whole fan base accepts the switch on the Space U/Citronauts thing, but so many people are like, ‘It’s time to rebrand to Citronauts full time,” Skiles said. “And then you have the Knights loyalists that are like, ‘Absolutely not, we are Knights. Our colors are black and gold.'”
Whatever they’re called, Houston isn’t giving up the Space City name, and UCF isn’t giving up the SpaceU name. And UCF is ready for Houston to hold up its end of the bargain in the burgeoning rivalry.
Skiles said in 2019, UCF approached UH to invite them to do their own alternate uniforms for UCFs’ Space Game when the Cougars visited Orlando. He knew he probably didn’t give Houston enough time to go all in, but he thought maybe they’d do a themed helmet, like UCF did with its hand-painted helmets resembling the moon’s dark and light sides, complete with craters.
“That was the 50th year of Apollo mission, the moon landing,” Skiles said. “We thought it’d be a really cool thing to have both of us do something. And it came game week and Houston didn’t do it.”
This time around, Houston is excited about visiting UCF as conference rivals, perhaps with a future trophy on the line.
“It is something we’re tracking on, trust me,” Houston athletic director Chris Pezman said. “It’s logical. It should have happened a long, long time ago. It’s something we’ve been working on for a few years. Now it’s time to get it going.”
Eric DeSalvo, UCF’s associate athletic director for content, remembers when he was a student at the school between 2005 and 2009 and could feel the ground rumble when space shuttles would launch at Canaveral. Seeing rockets launch from his own stadium never gets old, he said.
“It’s like a core memory you’ll always remember, being able to see a launch with thousands of your favorite fans,” DeSalvo said. “This season opener, we’re beating Kent State and right as the clock expired a [SpaceX] launch was going up. It’s so cool. It’s not every day you get to see that.”
So inside the building at UCF, they were excited to hear Holgorsen’s dig. It felt like liftoff for the two teams’ future in their own space race.
“Dana, where’s this been the whole time?” said Eric DeSalvo, UCF’s associate athletic director for content. “Why’d you wait until last week for that comment? We needed this.”
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Chris Low
NASHVILLE — It’s a memory that flashed through Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea’s mind more than once when the program was in the throes of a 26-game SEC losing streak in 2022, his second season as coach.
The memory presented itself again a year ago as Lea guided Vanderbilt to its first winning season since 2013, its first-ever win over a No. 1 team and a bowl victory over Georgia Tech, all culminating with Lea being named SEC Coach of the Year by his peers.
“I remember watching [assistant coach] Robbie Caldwell and my other coaches line the practice field and mow the grass when I played here,” said Lea, a fullback on head coach Bobby Johnson’s first teams at Vanderbilt from 2002-04. “They did everything.”
Contrast that to the scene last October after the Commodores’ signature win of the season, a 40-35 victory over top-ranked Alabama. Following Vanderbilt’s first win over the Crimson Tide in 40 years, fans ripped down the goalposts, paraded them through Nashville and dumped them into the Cumberland River.
The surreality of it all was matched by the resolve of Lea and his players, and their insistence that, in the words of quarterback Diego Pavia, “the rest of the world might have been shocked, but we weren’t.”
“We’re in a business of messaging, and a lot of what I remember as a player is the disconnect from the university and the athletic department and the team, and especially the lack of resources,” Lea said.
It’s a situation Lea inherited when he returned to his alma mater as coach in December 2020 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, as did his boss, Candice Storey Lee, when she was hired a year earlier as the SEC’s first Black female athletic director.
Together, they’re trying to change the narrative and not operate, as Lee jokes, like the little engine that could.
“It was the idea that we were going to unhook from the past and take steps that build toward the future that we all believe we’re capable of here,” said Lee, who has three degrees from Vanderbilt and was on campus the same time as Lea as a captain on the 2002 women’s basketball team that won the SEC tournament.
“Sometimes perception does not match reality, but the reality is that there was a narrative that Vanderbilt was not going to do the things that were necessary to experience consistent success. So from the very beginning, we had to set out to show that we were serious about wanting to compete and compete at the highest level, and we are still doing that. That process isn’t complete.”
Lea’s breakthrough 2024 season in his fourth year back on West End sent perhaps the clearest signal yet that the process is yielding results — and not just in football.
For the first time, Vanderbilt’s football team, men’s and women’s basketball teams and baseball team have all been nationally ranked during the same academic year.
But no climb has been steeper than the one faced by the football program, which was plummeting toward rock bottom when Lea arrived and only got worse during his second season, when the Commodores’ SEC losing streak reached 26 games. Lea wasn’t around for all those losses, but the walls were nonetheless closing in even when the Commodores salvaged a 5-7 record.
Then came 2023, when Vanderbilt dipped to 2-10 (0-8 in the SEC), and the heat ratcheted up on Lea. The Commodores lost all eight of their SEC games by two touchdowns or more.
“Hey, there were days where I was face down on the floor here, and it’s just, ‘Get yourself up, dust yourself off and trust in your resilience to do the next right thing the right way,'” Lea said. “For me, once I kind of realized that I may get my ass kicked a few times, nothing was going to knock me off from leading this program day in, day out, and making the changes that unlock the potential for success.”
Lea wasn’t the only one catching heat from the fans, media and some boosters. So was his former classmate Lee, who hired him. Making matters worse for Lee was that the men’s basketball team was struggling under Jerry Stackhouse and went 4-14 in SEC play during the 2023-24 season. Lee fired Stackhouse after the season and replaced him with Mark Byington, who took a team picked to finish last in the SEC to the NCAA tournament.
“One of the things that I know from going through knee replacement surgery recently is that healing and building is not a linear process,” Lee said. “Some days, it’s really good, and then something happens and I wake up and my knee is swollen. I don’t really understand what happened, but you still have to push forward and know there is something beautiful on the other side.
“You just wish it was easy, but it’s not.”
VANDERBILT’S CAMPUS, A short walk to the heart of downtown Nashville, one of America’s fastest growing cities, is dotted with signs that read “Dare to Grow.” Construction sites, cranes and hard hats are everywhere. Right outside Lea’s office window in the McGugin Center, the transformation of FirstBank Stadium continues with the South End Zone project, featuring premium seating and other amenities. It’s part of the Vandy United $300 million campaign, announced in 2021, to rebuild the school’s athletics facilities.
“We reached that $300 million goal pretty quickly, and we didn’t stop,” Lee said. “We have aspirations beyond that number, so we’re going to keep dreaming. We’re going to keep raising the money, we’re going to keep investing.”
The reality is that Vanderbilt can’t stop if it’s going to have any chance to compete with the football juggernauts in the SEC, especially in the current NIL world. But Lee is insistent that Vanderbilt is “beautifully positioned to maximize whatever model is in front of us” when the House settlement is approved and revenue sharing is in place. The current proposal allows for athletic departments to directly pay athletes with a pool up to $20.5 million in Year 1.
On the facilities front, even with the long overdue facelift to the stadium, the McGugin Center is noticeably outdated with a weight room, team meeting room and offices that pale in comparison to those at other SEC schools. Lea is hopeful a new football operations building comes sooner rather than later but said he doesn’t need a complex loaded with bells and whistles.
Lea looks at the new Huber Center, Vanderbilt’s four-story, state-of-the-art basketball practice facility, and sees what’s possible.
“It’s less important to me and for this program to have things like DJ booths and whatever else,” Lea said. “But I want people to walk into our building and recognize that football is really important here.
“What we’ve done really well here is that our people are the best, and if we can combine that with competitive spaces that also optimize our efficiency, we’re on our way to being where we need to be.”
Some of the people Lea, 43, is talking about are hires that were made primarily during last offseason, when he overhauled just about everything that touched his program. In the last year-plus, he has brought in veteran football people such as senior offensive adviser Jerry Kill, senior defensive analyst Bob Shoop, offensive coordinator Tim Beck and head strength coach Robert Stiner, among others. Kill and Beck are both former head coaches. Stiner and Lea worked together for three seasons at Notre Dame, and Shoop is a former Broyles Award finalist with more than 35 years of coaching experience. He was defensive coordinator under James Franklin for Vanderbilt teams that won nine games in 2012 and 2013.
Offensive line coach Chris Klenakis, entering his second season at Vanderbilt, has seen 24 of his former linemen reach the NFL over a 30-plus year career. He’s also been an offensive coordinator and worked with Colin Kaepernick at Nevada and Lamar Jackson at Louisville.
Lea hasn’t been hesitant to evolve, either. He took over the duties as defensive playcaller last season after the Commodores finished 129th nationally in scoring defense (36.2 points per game) and 131st in total defense (454.9 yards per game) in 2023. Lea said former NFL safety and assistant coach Steve Gregory, in his second season at Vanderbilt, will call defensive plays in 2025.
“I think it’s the best coaching staff in the country,” Pavia said. “Guys are going to want to come here because they see what these coaches get out of players. They see how they develop you. I know what Coach Kill did for me in bringing me here and what that opened up for me.”
PAVIA, WHO EMERGED as one of the most electric players in the country last season after transferring from New Mexico State, played as big a role as anyone in Vanderbilt’s revival. He was the only quarterback in the SEC to pass for more than 2,200 yards and rush for more than 800, accounting for 28 touchdowns, and inside the locker room, he was the heartbeat of a team that reveled in doing what people said couldn’t be done at “little old Vandy.”
Last year’s 7-6 season easily could have been a nine-win campaign. Four of the Commodores’ six losses were by a touchdown or less, including a 30-27 double overtime defeat at Missouri and a 27-24 home loss to Texas in which the Longhorns had to recover an onside kick to seal the game.
And the best part for the Commodores? They return many of the key players from last season, which saw Vanderbilt reach five wins before the end of October, only to lose three of its last four games in the regular season when Pavia wasn’t completely healthy.
“We had one guy transfer out that played for us last year,” said senior linebacker Langston Patterson, who was Lea’s first verbal commitment and went to high school in Nashville at Christ Christian Academy. “It’s about culture. The reason some of those past Vandy teams didn’t sustain success is because they had some great players, but no culture. We have great players on top of great culture, and that creates a great team. But you still have to go do it. Coach Lea touches on it all the time. We’re as close to 2-10 as we are 10-2. We’ve got to keep pushing forward.
“Really, to us, last year was mediocre. We fell apart the last three games. Everyone else thinks we had a great year, but to us, we could have been so much better.”
Lea’s idea of culture transcends the football field. He said the program has had six straight semesters with a collective 3.0 GPA or better in the classroom.
“That’s not because we’re recruiting valedictorians,” Lea said. “It’s because we’re recruiting guys that care about how they’re developing as people too, and they allow us to put boundaries in place for them to reach their highest level.”
As Vanderbilt tries to build on its momentum from a year ago, one thing is certain. The Commodores won’t sneak up on anybody, not after wins over Alabama and Auburn and narrow misses against LSU, Missouri and Texas.
“Nothing changes with us,” Pavia said. “We came here to win games. Coach Lea said it, that we want to have the best program in the SEC. For a lot of guys on this team, it’s our last chance, sort of our last dance, to really flip this program.”
Vanderbilt’s success a year ago came largely thanks to a ball-control offense, shortening the game, winning the turnover battle, stopping the run (especially on early downs) and playing lights-out on special teams.
Even with the recent upgrade in player personnel, it’s always going to be difficult for Vanderbilt to “out-Alabama” Alabama and “out-Georgia” Georgia in terms of sheer talent and depth.
“I know Coach Lea doesn’t believe that we can be like every other SEC team philosophically and find ways to break through to the top,” said offensive coordinator Beck, who also has been a defensive coordinator and spent the first 32 years of his coaching career at Division II powerhouse Pittsburg State. “You have to be a little bit different, and we were a little bit unique. I’m not one of these young offensive coordinators that’s just trying to score as many points as we can every game.
“You try to find ways to reduce the margins a little bit, so you’ve got to play complementary football. We still want to be fun and exciting, which I feel like we are, but we’re not going to be in a huge hurry. We led the nation in forced turnovers last year, which was huge for us because the matchups that we had player to player are still not there yet. We’ve got to be smart about what we do on both sides of the ball.”
Vanderbilt beat Auburn 17-7 last season despite finishing with just 227 total yards. But the Commodores pinned the Tigers inside their own 5-yard line twice, started two of their drives in Auburn territory, committed just three penalties and didn’t turn the ball over once.
“They manage the game as well as anybody,” Auburn coach Hugh Freeze said. “They’re smart. They play to their strengths, and they don’t give you anything.”
As stunning as Vanderbilt’s win over Alabama was to the college football world, Tide coach Kalen DeBoer wasn’t surprised by what he saw this season from Lea and the way he reinvigorated the program.
“I’ve known Clark going back to when he was at South Dakota State, and it wasn’t like we were close friends or anything, but I followed the success he’s had as a coordinator and knew that he was really good,” said DeBoer, who started his coaching career at Sioux Falls. “I felt like watching the film before our game that you could see the defense and the team philosophy revolving around making the game as short as possible, and he did a good job in the critical moments of making some calls.
“I knew going in that they were a different team than what they had been in the past. There was no doubt, and I think everyone who played them would tell you the same thing.”
Now comes the hard part for Lea and Vanderbilt: Doing it all over again.
The only time in the past 50 years that Vanderbilt has put together back-to-back winning seasons was in 2012 and 2013 under Franklin.
Lea, who grew up in Nashville, knows the doubters persist and that history suggests sustaining football success at Vanderbilt is more fantasy than reality. Down deep, he’s energized by that doubt.
“I think we as a program, me in particular, can’t help but operate with a chip on your shoulder, and you can’t help but bathe in the doubt that surrounds you,” Lea said. “We love that, and we don’t recruit beyond that, meaning I don’t want people here that are entitled. I don’t want people here that don’t see the work that has to be done.”
Pavia’s take is a bit more on the coarse side, in typical Pavia fashion.
“I mean, [Lea] comes from ground zero,” Pavia said. “A lot of people weren’t believing in him, people wanting him fired a year ago, and now all of a sudden, he’s the biggest star in Nashville. I think that still fuels him, that people gave up on him, didn’t believe in him on his journey or believe in us.
“So it’s like, ‘F— you. Watch us do it.'”
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Chris Low
The wait for where former Tennessee quarterback Nico Iamaleava plays next in his college career continued Wednesday as the spring transfer portal opened.
UCLA is among the schools interested in Iamaleava, but not for nearly the money he was asking for from Tennessee, sources told ESPN. One source said UCLA was content to “sit tight” while Iamaleava considered his options.
“We’ll see if it gets worked out. He’s extremely talented with starting experience against elite competition. That’s sort of where we are right now,” the UCLA source told ESPN.
Sources told ESPN that Iamaleava wanted at least $4 million from Tennessee and that what UCLA was prepared to offer him wasn’t remotely close to that figure. Iamaleava was earning $2.4 million at Tennessee under the contract he signed with Spyre Sports Group, the Tennessee-based collective, when he was still in high school. It’s a deal that would have paid him in the $10 million range had he stayed four years at Tennessee.
Tennessee coach Josh Heupel announced Saturday after the Volunteers’ spring game that the program was moving forward without Iamaleava after he missed practice and meetings Friday and didn’t alert anybody on the team or return any calls or text messages afterward.
Heupel thanked Iamaleava and called the situation unfortunate, but added, “There’s no one bigger than the Power T, and that includes me.”
Iamaleava, a rising redshirt sophomore, officially entered the transfer portal Wednesday with a do not contact tag.
Sources told ESPN that Iamaleava’s representatives asked to redo his deal just before the close of the winter portal in December after Tennessee’s playoff loss to Ohio State, but his deal was unchanged and Iamaleava did not enter the winter portal. His father, Nic Iamaleava, also wanted Tennessee to surround his son with better receivers and a more effective offensive line in pass protection.
Before the start of spring practice this year, Iamaleava’s representatives reached out to Oregon to gauge its interest in the quarterback, but the school said it wasn’t interested, sources told ESPN. Oregon then notified Tennessee that Iamaleava was being shopped to the Ducks.
Iamaleava, a five-star prospect from Long Beach, California, was recruited by UCLA out of high school. His younger brother, Madden Iamaleava, committed to UCLA out of high school but changed his commitment at the last minute and signed with Arkansas.
With Iamaleava a possibility at UCLA, sources told ESPN that representatives for the Bruins’ current quarterback, Joey Aguilar, have been covering their bases and making calls to other schools to gauge their interest in Aguilar, who transferred from Appalachian State this offseason and exited spring practice as UCLA’s likely starter.
A Power 4 general manager told ESPN’s Pete Thamel and Max Olson earlier this week that he thought Iamaleava has “zero market,” and added that it would be an “interesting test of how smart and disciplined colleges are in looking at him.”
Iamaleava helped guide Tennessee to the College Football Playoff last season in his first year as a starter. He passed for 2,616 yards, 19 touchdowns and 5 interceptions, but in nine games against SEC opponents and Ohio State in the playoff, he passed for more than 200 yards only twice.
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