What makes Adrian Beltre a Hall of Famer — through the eyes of those who know him best
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Alden Gonzalez, ESPN Staff Writer
Adrián Beltré is all but certain to be a Hall of Famer on Tuesday night, after the Baseball Writers’ Association of America reveals its ballots. His credentials — 3,166 hits, 477 home runs, a .286/.339/.480 career slash line and the third-highest WAR ever among third basemen — make it a no-brainer. Over a career that spanned three decades with four different teams, Beltré was a four-time Silver Slugger and a five-time Gold Glover, as formidable on offense as he was dynamic on defense.
But it isn’t the accomplishments that define him. It’s how he reached them, how much fun he seemed to have along the way and how he made us feel when we watched him. It’s how he homered off a knee and made plays from the ground and glared at those who dared to rub his head. His skills were remarkable, but his vibe was unmatched.
What follows is a look through Beltré’s splendid, soon-to-be Hall of Fame career through the eyes of four of his closest observers.
Albert Pujols: On Beltré’s impact as a Dominican star
Albert Pujols crossed home plate, bypassed the St. Louis Cardinals teammates who waited to embrace him and darted straight to the Dodger Stadium backstop. Pujols had just become the first Dominican-born member of the 700-home-run club, an exceedingly short list without qualifiers, and all he wanted to do was share the moment with Adrián Beltré, the first Dominican-born player to reach 3,000 hits.
He found him in his first-row seat and high-fived him through the netting.
“I wanted to celebrate that with my countryman, Adrián Beltré — somebody I respect, somebody special to me,” Pujols said, thinking back to that night on Sept. 23, 2022. “There was nothing really planned or anything; it was just something that came out of me. That, for me — and this is how I look at it now — was like sharing with 10 million people that were watching in the Dominican Republic. That little moment with him, it reminded me of how much it meant to our country.”
Pujols had spent most of his career admiring Beltré from afar. He felt a kinship through Beltré’s willingness to play hurt and admired his ability to maintain a competitive edge while also not taking himself too seriously, a dichotomy that to Pujols felt impossible. To this day, Pujols marvels at the game-tying home run Beltré hit off Chris Carpenter in Game 5 of the 2011 World Series, buckling to a knee while turning on a breaking ball and sending it over the left-field fence. As the years went on, Pujols often wondered aloud about what it might be like to share an infield with Beltré.
But they weren’t necessarily friends. Not close ones, at least. They competed in the same league — sometimes, like in 2004, for the same MVP trophy — then later in the same division. Their ambition created a wedge that only softened when their respective careers began to wind down. Retirement brought them closer.
“The best thing that I love about Adrián is the relationship that him and I now have,” Pujols said. “I was just with him playing golf a couple of weeks ago in the Dominican Republic. I was with him in Dubai. I feel like we have built the relationship over the last two or three years, towards the end of his career, towards the end of my career, and that’s something that I love about us.”
Pujols is one of only two players, along with Hank Aaron, to reach 700 homers, 2,000 RBIs and 3,000 hits. But Beltré occupies an exclusive club of his own, among just four players to reach 400 homers and 3,000 hits while also accumulating at least five Gold Gloves, a testament to his all-around greatness.
The two stand as mythical figures on the baseball-loving island that produced them, both because of the stardom they attained and how often they gave back. Lately, Pujols and Beltre have collaborated on charitable work in the Dominican Republic, the latest of which was Beltré’s charity golf tournament to develop a baseball facility in the Dominican town of Verón.
“He does it from his heart; he doesn’t do it just to put his name in the paper,” Pujols said. “That, to me, is what makes Adrián Beltré really special.”
Both Beltré and Pujols are certain Hall of Famers, but their trajectories were drastically different.
Pujols, who won’t be eligible until 2028, surged from the onset, immediately putting together arguably the best 10-year stretch in baseball history, then faded rather aggressively in his 30s. Beltré took a while to get going, not making his first All-Star team until his age-31 season, but he was at his best throughout the second half of his career. In some ways, he aged backward.
“It should be more impressive because of the way that he has done it — late in his career, it clicked for him, and he took advantage,” Pujols said. “He recognized it, and he turned things around.”
Manny Mota: On Beltré’s ‘desire to be great’
It began with two folding chairs near a batting cage tucked within the bowels of Dodger Stadium, and similar settings in other major league ballparks across the country. This is where Manny Mota and Adrián Beltré spent most of their early afternoons in the late 1990s and early 2000s, talking about the work ahead of them before most of the other Los Angeles Dodgers had arrived.
“We talked like two friends,” said Mota, the Dodgers’ pinch-hitting legend who later spent four decades assisting their coaching staff. “Not like instructor and player, but like two friends sharing in what we were going to try to do — with the same idea, with the same purpose.”
Mota learned about Beltré shortly after the Dodgers signed him as a 15-year-old out of the Dominican Republic in 1994 (when he had famously, and illegally, falsified his birth date). He watched Beltré star at the organization’s Dominican academy in summer 1995 and was blown away by his strength and quickness. When Beltré and other prominent Dodgers minor leaguers were invited to train with the major league players in spring training the following year, late manager Tommy Lasorda put Mota in charge of him. And when Beltré reached the majors as a 19-year-old in 1998, he became Mota’s most important project.
They became almost inseparable, their relationship resembling that of a father and son, and it was those afternoon conversations, Mota said, that set the tone.
They typically centered on positivity.
“That was my responsibility as a coach — to not let him fall,” Mota, now 85, said in Spanish. “It was to lift him up. Because we’re here to instill confidence, not to destroy it.”
Beltré breezed through the lower levels of the Dodgers’ minor league system at 17 and 18 years old and became easily the sport’s youngest player when he was called up near the end of June in 1998. He had skipped Triple-A entirely, accumulating fewer than 300 plate appearances above the Class A level, and his inexperience was notable. Beltré batted .215 as a rookie, then was basically a league-average hitter in the four full seasons that followed. His defense was elite, his offensive tools were obvious, but consistency eluded him.
Mota remained his strongest advocate. He had long become convinced that Latin American players needed more seasoning than those who entered baseball’s pipeline domestically because of the disparity in resources, and so he continually preached patience to those above him. In Beltré, he noticed unrelenting positivity amid struggle.
“He handled it admirably,” Mota said. “He handled it in a great way because he recognized that he was at a level he belonged and just needed to make the necessary adjustments in order to succeed. That’s what he ultimately realized. He knew it was a process. It wasn’t easy. He was going to have his good days and his bad, but he was going to keep learning.”
Everything suddenly came together in 2004, in the run-up to free agency. Beltré hit a major league-leading 48 home runs, compiled 121 RBIs, slashed .334/.388/.629 and accumulated 9.7 fWAR, still the most by a Dodgers position player. His OPS, 1.017, was 269 points higher than his career average heading in. If not for Barry Bonds, he would’ve won the National League MVP Award.
That year, nearly two-thirds of Beltré’s home runs were hit to center and right field, the byproduct of a patient, opposite-field approach refined by new hitting coach Tim Wallach — but one he and Mota had begun honing years earlier in the backfields of the Dodgers’ Vero Beach, Florida, complex.
“His desire to be great — that, more than anything else, is what impressed me the most,” Mota said. “He was always ready to work and to receive instruction and to apply it. He was very positive. And he always gave you the best he had.”
Elvis Andrus: On Beltré’s infectious joy
In Seattle, it was Félix Hernández. In Boston, it was Marco Scutaro and Victor Martinez. And so in the spring of 2011, a 22-year-old Elvis Andrus turned to a soon-to-be-32-year-old Adrián Beltré and relayed some tough news: It has to be another Venezuelan who touches your head in Texas, he told him, and that person is going to be me.
“He didn’t like it very much because he hates it when people touch his head,” Andrus said in Spanish. “But like I told him, ‘The only way I like to get hit by somebody is when you hit a home run, so I’m going to keep doing it and keep being annoying so you keep hitting home runs.'”
Beltré’s Hall of Fame résumé was built on his prowess, but his essence was marked by the spontaneity and hilarity of his antics — by the unique ways in which he emanated joy. Like when he dodged a liquid bath with a push broom. Or ran toward the pitcher’s mound during a rundown. Or stopped his stride like a Looney Tunes character. Or pushed José Altuve off third base. Or mockingly danced at Andrelton Simmons. Or screamed at Hernández on his way to first. Or dragged the on-deck circle before an at-bat, triggering one of the most ridiculous ejections in recent memory.
Beltré’s ability to exude levity and tenacity simultaneously made him unlike any others before him. It was his gift to the sport — and Andrus, his shortstop partner throughout his eight-year stint with the Texas Rangers, often triggered it with those unrelenting attempts to rub the top of his head.
Beltré would playfully take swings when Andrus touched his crown as he high-fived teammates in the dugout, but he’d get legitimately mad — at times enraged — when it happened within the sanctity of a clubhouse. But Andrus’ pestering knew no limits. Once, Andrus found an opening in the middle of a meeting on the the pitcher’s mound and Beltré reacted by flinging his glove like a Little Leaguer.
“We were in Seattle,” Andrus recalled. “We were playing, and I was messing with him because that day we had a pop-up and we did what we always did, messing around, calling each other off. I caught the ball and he told me, ‘Don’t f— around. Leave my fly balls alone. Those are mine.’ And I told him, ‘Hey, I’m the shortstop. I’m in charge here.’ Then when they’re changing the pitcher and he told me, ‘We’ll see the next one,’ I touched his head with my glove and I started running. I figured he wouldn’t do anything because we’re in the middle of the field. The last thing I imagined was that he would throw his glove. Then I saw the replay and I died laughing.”
Beltré’s tenure as Andrus’ infield partner came after five sluggish years offensively in Seattle. Some of those who know him well believe the pressure to live up to a $64 million contract — signed after his spectacular 2004 season — in a new place got to him, at least initially. Many others pointed to the difficulty of being a right-handed hitter inside T-Mobile Park at that time, before the fences moved in. Beltré went on to sign a one-year deal with the Boston Red Sox in January 2010 — a development that introduced “pillow contract” into our lexicon — and finished within the top 10 in MVP voting, parlaying a dominant season into a six-year, $96 million agreement with the Rangers.
The Rangers made the deal expecting the typical regression of a power hitter in his 30s. What they got instead was a renaissance. Over a six-year stretch from 2011 to 2016, Beltré slashed .308/.358/.516 while accumulating 167 home runs, 563 RBIs and 32.4 fWAR, seventh most in the majors. He earned three All-Star selections, won two Silver Sluggers and accumulated three Gold Gloves for Rangers teams that consistently competed for championships, establishing himself as one of the greatest third basemen in baseball history.
The environment, many believe, helped him flourish. And Andrus was a driving force. The two had neighboring lockers in their first spring training together and hit it off immediately. Beltré took on the role of an older brother, and Andrus credits Beltré more than anyone else for helping him grow. Some of Beltré’s close friends point to a telling aspect of their dynamic: Andrus, a kid when they first met, had the confidence to mess with an accomplished veteran like Beltré as often as he did. To them, it speaks to the type of teammate Beltre was.
“A lot of people were scared of Adrián,” Andrus said, “but I never understood that because he was the type of person who, if you did things correctly and played hard and played to win, he was never going to have a problem with you. I never saw him have a problem with anyone who did things right and got to the field to give their heart every day to win. That’s the only thing he asked from us as teammates. And it wasn’t just that he asked for it — it’s what he gave us.”
Jon Daniels: On Beltré’s legendary pain tolerance
It was the middle of June 2015, three weeks into Adrián Beltré’s latest stint on the injured list. He was nursing a torn ligament in his left thumb, which he jammed while sliding into second base on the final night of May. A hand specialist met with Beltré; his agent, Scott Boras; and the Rangers’ medical staff in Anaheim, California, to inform him that surgery was the only path to improvement. Everybody but Beltré agreed.
“Can I make it worse?” Beltré asked.
Beltré had already received a cortisone injection that did not take. The pain was excruciating. He was told once again that an invasive surgery was the only option left. Beltré kept pressing.
“But I can’t make it any worse, right?”
Jon Daniels, the Rangers’ head of baseball operations at the time, was baffled but unsurprised. Daniels had spent four years alongside Beltré by that point and was often stunned by his willingness to play hurt. He knew where this was going. Beltré was told that, no, he could not make his thumb any worse than it already was.
“All right,” Beltré said, “I’ll play through it.”
“The rest of us in the room were like, ‘Are you serious?'” Daniels recalled. “I mean, I think he was having trouble doing basic, day-to-day functions.”
One of the two most vivid examples of Beltré’s legendary pain tolerance occurred in 2001, when a ruptured and infected appendix caused him to lose 34 pounds and forced him to arrive at spring training with an IV port stuck in his arm and a colostomy bag tucked into his pants. He played anyway. The other took place in 2009, when one of his testicles swelled to the size of a grapefruit because of a ninth-inning grounder that took a bad hop. Beltré singled and scored the winning run five innings later, missed the next 18 games, came back and still refused to wear an athletic cup.
But Daniels, now a senior advisor with the Tampa Bay Rays, can rattle off a handful of other, similarly impressive instances from personal experience. Like when Beltré spent a night in the hospital with abdominal blockage in 2012, then batted cleanup the following day. Or when he returned from a hamstring strain twice as fast as even the most optimistic projections in 2017. Or when he OPS’d .836 while playing with a battered thumb over the final three-plus months of the aforementioned 2015 season, pushing the Rangers into the playoffs.
The ensuing postseason began with a phone call from Rangers athletic trainer Kevin Harmon. Beltré, Harmon told Daniels, had thrown out his back and could hardly move. He was angling to play in Game 1 of the American League Division Series, but Harmon didn’t think it was possible.
Beltré was inserted into the No. 3 spot of the lineup, but he could barely rotate his hips or swing his bat while attempting to loosen his muscles in the on-deck circle. He drew a four-pitch walk in the top of the first, then attempted to play defense for two half-innings. When he came to bat again in the third, he drove an 0-1 sinker from David Price up the middle for a two-out RBI single. Had Toronto Blue Jays center fielder Kevin Pillar noticed how slowly Beltré made his way up the line, Daniels said, he might have thrown him out at first base. Beltré was subbed out for the next half-inning and missed the next two games, but he returned for Game 4.
“There was a little healthy fear of Adrián throughout the organization,” Daniels said. “I remember the couple times this guy was hurt and he had to go on the IL you were like, ‘All right, who’s going to tell him?’ It was kind of funny. If he agreed to go on the IL, you knew it was bad. Because typically he was like, ‘No, f— that, I’ll be fine.’ I mean, he’d literally just walk out of my office like, ‘No, I’m not going on. See you later.’ And you’re like, ‘I thought I was the guy in charge here.'”
Beltré made such a habit of toughing out injuries he became a master at playing through them. In some ways, injuries actually might have made him better. Beltré spent the last five months of his breakout 2004 season playing through two bone spurs in one of his ankles, a development some believe might have forced him to be more patient and make better use of his hands in the batter’s box. His elite arm strength allowed him to make difficult throws without doing too much work with his lower half, a blessing given the assortment of leg issues that plagued him. Early on, when throwing errors were a problem, having less mobility in his legs actually helped his accuracy.
Beltré played in 2,933 regular-season games in a career that spanned 21 years, more than all but 14 people in major league history.
He willed his way through an inordinate amount of them.
“I think it was this mix of competitiveness, pride and responsibility,” Daniels said. “It was just like, ‘If I can go, I’m going to do it. I want to be there for my teammates. I want to win.’ All the right reasons. He never vocalized that, so I don’t want to put words in his mouth. But that was always my sense.”
The Washington Nationals are finalizing a deal to hire Blake Butera as manager and make him the youngest person to hold the job in the majors in more than half a century, sources told ESPN on Thursday.
At 33 years old, Butera will be the youngest manager since the Minnesota Twins hired Frank Quilici in 1972, according to ESPN Insights.
With their rebuild since a 2019 World Series win stalled, the Nationals fired general manager Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez in July. Former Boston Red Sox assistant general manager Paul Toboni was hired in late September as president of baseball operations to replace Rizzo, and Washington’s search for a manager landed on an unlikely candidate in Butera.
Previously the senior player development director for the Tampa Bay Rays, Butera has managed four minor league seasons — the first at 25 years old — and compiled a 258-144 record with four first-place finishes. In his final two seasons with Low-A Charleston, Butera’s teams went 170-82 and won league championships.
Butera’s experience extends beyond the Rays, who drafted him in the 35th round in 2015 out of Boston College, where he played four years and served as team captain. He played two seasons in Tampa Bay’s minor league system before transitioning to coaching and spent a year as quality-control coach for Leones del Escogido in the Dominican Winter League as well as bench coach for Team Italy in the 2023 World Baseball Classic.
With fluency in advanced metrics and the detail-oriented approach that has made Rays employees coveted by other teams, Butera was regarded in the industry as a future manager. His combination of managerial and player-development experience appealed to the Nationals, whose hiring of Toboni, 35, gave them the youngest head of baseball operations as well.
Washington’s path back to relevancy in the loaded National League East is expected to take years. While the Nationals have a franchise-caliber player in outfielder James Wood, teams plan to inquire about their willingness to trade left-hander MacKenzie Gore, who is two years from reaching free agency, and shortstop CJ Abrams, who will hit the open market after the 2028 season.
The Nationals’ farm system was ranked 22nd in MLB by ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel following the selection of Oklahoma prep shortstop Eli Willits with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 draft. Washington’s top pitching prospect, Travis Sykora, underwent Tommy John surgery in July and is expected to miss most of the 2026 season.
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‘We’ve got to figure something out’: Dodgers must start hitting — or this World Series is over
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Alden Gonzalez
With two on and two out in Game 5’s fourth inning, Tommy Edman took his best swing on a Trey Yesavage slider that stayed above the zone. Edman got just under it. The popup fell harmlessly into the glove of Toronto Blue Jays shortstop Andrés Giménez, halting an early threat against a budding ace who was just beginning to find his rhythm.
For weeks, the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ hitters had grown frustrated not just by an overall lack of production but by an inability to finish rallies. Edman’s popup was merely the latest example. The Dodgers did not place another runner in scoring position Wednesday night, continuing a prolonged trend that has their season on the brink and many of their hitters confused.
Said Mookie Betts: “We’ve got to figure something out.”
With the urgency rising and his patience lacking, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts made relatively drastic changes to his lineup ahead of Game 5. Will Smith became the first catcher in 90 years to hit in the No. 2 spot in a World Series game, sliding Betts down to bat third for the first time since 2021. Alex Call replaced the No. 9-hitting Andy Pages, who had managed just four hits in 50 at-bats in these playoffs.
The changes did not work. The Dodgers struck out 12 times and managed just three hits in seven innings against Yesavage, losing a critical game and forcing themselves to have to win on back-to-back nights in Toronto to secure a championship.
On Wednesday, Yesavage’s command was sharp, his slider was hellacious, but the Dodgers’ struggles extend way beyond him. Since cruising past the Cincinnati Reds in the wild-card round, their hitters are slashing a combined .214/.306/.360 in 13 playoff games, during which they’ve produced a .544 OPS with runners in scoring position. The Dodgers’ nine wins in that stretch are a testament to a starting rotation that is unfairly being asked to do it alone.
“It’s hard for a pitching staff to have to go every game uphill,” utility man Enrique Hernandez said. “We’re not really doing much as an offense. Whenever we get a chance, we don’t capitalize. We’re going through one of those funks right now; it’s just really bad timing to have those in the World Series.”
The Dodgers suffered through a similar low point at midseason. From July 4 to Aug. 13, when they went 12-21 and blew an eight-game division lead, they batted .235 and scored the majors’ sixth-fewest runs per game. Eventually, they got right. And though their regular season was generally underwhelming, the Dodgers approached October with the thought that their best baseball was ahead of them. It was a belief buoyed by their starting pitching, dominant enough to stifle any opposing lineup and deep enough to make up for most bullpen issues. But the offense was expected to perform.
It seemed like a given, until it wasn’t.
“We’ve got a lot of guys who aren’t hot right now,” Edman said, “aren’t feeling their best.”
It starts at the top.
In Game 5, the Nos. 1-4 hitters in the Dodgers’ lineup combined to go 1-for-15 with eight strikeouts. Shohei Ohtani has put together three masterful offensive performances — homering twice in the playoff opener, clinching a pennant with a three-homer game and reaching base nine times in the 18-inning marathon earlier this week — but he’s 6-for-48 in 12 other playoff games. Freeman is batting .235 over the last three rounds. Betts is 3-for-23 in the World Series.
“I’ve just been terrible,” Betts said. “I wish it were from lack of effort, but it’s not.”
And it’s not just the three future Hall of Famers. It’s Max Muncy (.188/.339/.354 postseason slash line). It’s Pages (.215 OPS, the lowest ever for a player with at least 50 plate appearances in a single playoff). It’s Enrique Hernández, one of history’s most illustrious October performers (.844 career postseason OPS, but 4-for-26 over his past seven games).
In 123 innings since the wild-card round, the Dodgers have scored three or more runs just three times. And though hitting is significantly more difficult this time of year, their opponent is providing a snapshot of what is possible.
The Blue Jays have outscored the Dodgers by 11 runs in this series and by a whopping 36 runs in these playoffs, even though they’ve played just one more game.
“It doesn’t feel great,” Roberts said. “You clearly see those guys finding ways to get hits, move the baseball forward, and we’re not doing a good job of it.”
After a night in which the Dodgers got a solo home run and nothing else, ultimately taking just one at-bat with a runner in scoring position, Roberts stressed to his team the importance of adjusting — of shortening up, hitting the ball the other way, working deep counts and getting the opposing bullpen more heavily involved.
“We gotta hit the ball,” Muncy said. “You look at what they’re doing, they put the ball in play a lot, and it’s finding spots. We’re not putting the ball in play a lot, and when we do, it seems to be finding the glove.”
The Dodgers are striking out at a 25.3% rate in this series, a little more than three percentage points higher than they did during the regular season. Their chase rate is 28.6%, compared to 25.9% from March to September. It’s an uptick, but not a seismic one, especially when you layer in the added difficulty of facing so many high-leverage arms in October. The biggest problem, some of their players believe, is they’re caught in between — passive at the wrong time, too aggressive on pitches they can’t slug and generally not diligent enough with their approach.
“We just have to have a better selection of pitches that we want to swing at,” Dodgers outfielder Teoscar Hernández said. “We just have to get a better plan, not trying to do too much with the pitches that they throw. Every pitcher in the playoffs, he can make the best pitches and the best location that he can make, and we have to adjust to that and just try to do damage on the ones we can handle.”
Late Wednesday night, as players gathered their belongings and prepared to board another cross-country flight to Toronto, many of them found hope in the rejuvenation of an off day. They know Rogers Centre will be rocking on Friday night, eager to celebrate the Blue Jays’ first championship in 32 years, but they took solace in whom they had to counter it — Yoshinobu Yamamoto, fresh off another nine-inning mastery.
They also know he can’t do it alone.
“We’ve got a lot of confidence in him, but we’ve got to hit,” Betts said. “Yoshi is going to do his thing. We need him to, obviously. But we’ve got to hit. There’s no way around that.”
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Mark Schlabach
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.”
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