Remember that iconic moment in MLB history? Dusty Baker probably was there for it
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Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer
Dusty Baker’s managerial career officially ended Thursday, with a news release and news conference and all the trimmings that come with the end of a career of one of the rarefied few who reach a place of accomplishment as distinctive as Baker.
Yet even that felt somewhat inadequate, as if the occasion should have been marked by a national holiday or a Martin Scorsese documentary. There simply has been no one like Dusty Baker in baseball — or most any other sport.
“This isn’t a goodbye, it’s simply a ‘see you later,'” Baker said, telling reporters that he wants to remain active in baseball. Thankfully, we can be sure we haven’t heard the last from Baker, even if he is finished as a field manager. Only six managers have won more regular-season games. Only three have won more postseason games. And all of that happened after a fine playing career in which he hit 242 homers, racked up 1,941 hits, won one title and three pennants, and perhaps invented the high-five.
Through it all, he experienced every playoff format baseball has ever had, the advent of free agency and the DH, the lowering of the mound, the rise of analytics and so many other changes in baseball that you can’t possibly list them all.
Yet none of these numbers or events really do justice to Baker’s journey. Almost nothing can. He has brushed shoulders with the game’s greats from the day he arrived in the majors. His time has stretched from Mantle to Ohtani, from Johnson to Biden, from Eckert to Manfred.
Two fictional characters leap to mind as comparisons: Zelig and Forrest Gump. Both are depicted in picaresque tales in which they encounter some of the most famous people of their time and are present at numerous historical events. That’s Baker’s baseball story in a nutshell. (Though both comparisons fall apart with a little scrutiny: Baker has neither the chameleon-like persona of Zelig nor the sweet simplicity of Gump.)
The breadth of Baker’s baseball experience is staggering. Indeed, if you wanted to tell the history of baseball over the past 56 years, you could do worse than to simply trace back through Baker’s career.
In other words: If someone mentions something important that happened in baseball during your lifetime, just say, “Dusty Baker was there for that.” And you’ll probably be right.
Hank Aaron hits his 715th home run
Right from the start, Baker moved with — and competed against — some of the most notable baseball personalities of the past half-century. On his very first professional team, the 1967 Austin Braves, he was teammates with Cito Gaston, who would later become the first black manager to win a World Series. (Baker would become the third.)
In Baker’s first big league game on Sept. 7, 1968, he shared the field with both Aaron brothers (Hank and Tommy), Tito Francona (Terry’s father), Felipe Alou, Rusty Staub, Jim “The Toy Cannon” Wynn and Hall of Fame knuckleballer Phil Niekro.
One of the Braves’ coaches in his early years was the great Satchel Paige. (“He called me Daffy,” Baker told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2010. “I said, ‘My name is Dusty.’ He said, ‘Daffy, I know what your name is.'”)
In 1971, Baker got his first hit of the season into a Pirates outfield that featured Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell.
The list goes on. But of all the brushes with greatness Baker had already experienced, they paled in comparison to his friendship with Hank Aaron, who was moved to first base in 1972 in part because of Baker’s arrival in the majors.
Baker and Aaron were close from the start, with the legend taking the kid under his wing, at the behest of Dusty’s mother. Baker not only bore witness to the historic moment but also to the stress and horrors Aaron had to cope with during the leadup to the mark. Baker later spoke of digging some of the threatening letters Aaron had received out of the trash to read them so he could understand what his friend was going through.
Then came April 8, 1974, one of the iconic dates in baseball history, one embedded in our collective consciousness: Aaron mashed career homer No. 715, breaking Babe Ruth’s hallowed record. Watching from the on-deck circle: Dusty Baker, who leaped in celebration while hugging his close friend, Ralph “Gator” Garr, as Aaron circled the bases.
“He was second only to my dad, and my dad meant the world to me,” Baker told MLB.com upon Aaron’s death in 2021.
Baker had already seen and done so much by that point, but this was his first appearance in what would become a featured role in baseball’s historical highlight reel.
Rick Monday saves the American flag
In 1975, the Braves were struggling, and Baker had repeatedly asked to be traded. Atlanta finally obliged at the end of the season, the trade ostensibly agreed to during the World Series (talks hit a snag when Dodgers exec Al Campanis — yes, him — also asked for Braves catcher Biff Pocoroba). Baker said he found out about the trade while on a family vacation when they stopped off at the Grand Canyon. They checked into a motel, flipped on the TV, and Baker’s face was on the screen.
When Baker arrived for his intro in Los Angeles in December, he showed up on a day when the smog-ridden city was mired in soot from nearby brush fires. Baker thought it might be symbolic. “Maybe so, because I know I want to burn things up in L.A.”
He did, on the field anyway, but he also bore witness to a different kind of L.A. fire.
On April 25, 1976, Baker was out of the lineup, nursing a hamstring injury as L.A. took on the Cubs at Dodger Stadium. But he was there just the same when, during that day’s game, a protester leaped onto the field and attempted to burn an American flag.
Cubs outfielder Rick Monday, like Baker once a member of the Marine reserves (as well as being a future teammate in L.A.), was having none of it. In one of the most replayed non-game-action moments in baseball history, Monday snatched the flag and carried it away.
The high-five is invented
On April 10, 1977, Baker hit the first of what turned into a career-best 30 homers that season, hammering an Ed Halicki pitch over the wall at Dodger Stadium. The ’77 Dodgers turned out to be the team Baker always wanted to play for, but the style in which they won was surprising, at least to their own manager. Tommy Lasorda hoped to rev up the L.A. running game, predicting 250 stolen bases, 25 of which would come from Baker.
Instead, the Dodgers became one of the most iconic power-hitting teams of the era on their way to a pennant — and stole 114 bags in all. Baker hit those 30 bombs but went 2-for-8 on the basepaths.
By Oct. 2, the final day of the regular season, the Dodgers had already put the wraps on the NL West title when Baker hit his 30th homer off Houston fireballer J.R. Richard. The blast gave the Dodgers four 30-homer hitters, with Steve Garvey, Ron Cey and Reggie Smith joining Baker in the club. No team had ever done that and Baker was given a “half-dozen” standing ovations from the L.A. fans, according to The Sporting News.
But that’s not why that moment has lived on. On deck behind Baker was Glenn Burke. As Baker approached the plate at the end of his home run trot, Burke held his hand up over his head in greeting. Baker slapped the hand in celebration. It was like slapping him five only, you know, doing it up high. And thus the high-five was born — or at least that’s how the legend now goes.
Reggie Jackson hits three homers in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series
Baker didn’t get into his first postseason until those 1977 Dodgers ended the reign of the Big Red Machine in the NL West. Baker was ready for his first taste of playoff baseball, hammering a two-run jack off Hall of Fame lefty Steve Carlton as the Dodgers eliminated the Phillies with a 4-1 win in Game 4 of the NLCS. Baker had two homers and eight RBIs in the series and was named NLCS MVP. For the first time, Baker was on his way to the World Series.
Baker had his moments in the Fall Classic, including a three-run homer off Mike Torrez that accounted for all of the Dodgers’ runs in a Game 3 loss. But this series will always be remembered for its finale, Game 6 on Oct. 18, 1977.
A front seat to history in 1981
There’s no easy way to sum up everything about the 1981 baseball season — Baker experienced the strike, a new playoff format and Fernandomania — but of course, Dusty was right in the middle of it in L.A.
Baker enjoyed one of his best seasons in 1980, hitting .294/.339/.503 with 29 homers and 97 RBIs. He finished fourth in NL MVP balloting and won a Silver Slugger Award. At 31, his timing couldn’t have been better: Baker became a free agent and did so as one of the most sought-after players on the market.
The power of free agency had become much more prominent in the years before Baker’s deal was up, giving him plenty of leverage. But he decided to re-up with the Dodgers, signing a five-year, $4 million deal.
That meant he had a front-row seat to the viral sensation that was Fernando Valenzuela in his rookie year in L.A. Still the only player to win Rookie of the Year and a Cy Young in the same season, Valenzuela also captured the hearts of fans across California and the country.
By the end of the year, Baker had made his first All-Star team, won his first Gold Glove and, most importantly, took home his first ring. That last item happened when the Dodgers hammered Reggie and the Yankees 9-2 in Game 6 of the World Series to take the crown. Baker had two hits and scored two runs in the game.
The 1981 season is most remembered as the strike season, the campaign when baseball shut down for two months and the regular season was split into two halves. The Dodgers, winners of the NL West’s first half, had already clinched a playoff spot when play resumed after the stoppage.
Baker had debuted under the traditional two-league format in 1968; he was on one of the first division champs (albeit in a limited role) when division play began a year later. In 1981, he was a participant in the third format of the big league playoffs, one that saw the first division series.
An earthquake rattles the 1989 World Series
Baker’s career as an active player ended in 1986 — with an A’s team that was on the cusp of exploding. That final season, Baker was teammates with slugging rookie Jose Canseco and even more powerful late-season call-up Mark McGwire. He spent his final months as an active player being managed by a former teammate in Atlanta who’d been hired by Oakland during the season: Tony La Russa.
In Baker’s final game, against Kansas City, La Russa started him at DH; he went 0-for-1 with two walks before being replaced by a pinch runner.
A playing career that began on the same field with Joe Torre, the Aarons, Niekro, Alou, the elder Francona, Staub and Wynn ended on a field shared with Canseco, McGwire, Dave Kingman, Mark Gubicza, Bud Black, Dave Stewart, George Brett and a very athletic rookie outfielder for Kansas City, Bo Jackson.
At the time, Baker, 37, didn’t know it would be his last game. He became a free agent after the season with the intention of continuing his career. It didn’t happen, and for a while, Baker worked as a stockbroker. In February 1988, he was hired to coach first base by the Giants; he soon became their hitting coach.
Baker was helping his Giants hitters prepare for Game 3 of the World Series on Oct. 17, 1989, when, before the game, the ground and Candlestick Park alike began to shake. A major earthquake had struck the Bay Area, and it was 12 days before the World Series could resume.
Coaching Bonds — to legendary also-ran status
The winter of 1992-93 was a whirlwind time for the Giants. Peter Magowan became principal owner of the team; Bob Quinn became the general manager and fired his manager. The team signed Barry Bonds to a historic six-year, $43 million contract. Eight days after that, Baker was hired as the Giants’ skipper.
The hire was the culmination of what had been Baker’s five-year plan to become a manager. He worked his way from first-base coach to respected hitting coach and served a stint as a skipper in the Arizona Fall League.
Baker was still only 43 when the Giants put him in charge of the clubhouse. The fit was ideal. He’d long been friends with Bonds’ father and installed Bobby as a coach on his son’s first few Giants teams.
“This is the greatest day of my life, so far,” Baker told the media. “The next greatest day is when we win the pennant and the world championship.”
Sure enough, by mid-July, the Giants were 67-33. Baker’s mark in his first 100 games as a big league manager was the second best in history, surpassed only by Sparky Anderson (70-30 in 1970).
At that point, the Giants had a sizeable lead over Atlanta for the division — but it wouldn’t hold up. An eight-game losing streak in September saw the team go from 2½ games up over Atlanta to 3½ back. The Giants recovered and could have forced a tiebreaker with a win against the Dodgers on Oct. 3, 1993, the last day of the regular season.
It didn’t happen. The Dodgers homered four times, including two from future Hall of Famer Mike Piazza. Kevin Gross went the distance for L.A., Bonds went 0-for-4 and Lasorda’s club rolled to a 12-1 win.
The Giants finished 103-59 but did not advance to the postseason. It was the last season before baseball expanded the playoff format, splitting into three divisions per league and introducing a wild-card slot. The ’93 NL West race is now regarded as the last great pure pennant race in big league annals, the kind that cannot possibly happen in today’s format.
This was the format in which Baker had been competing as a player and manager for 25 years, but dropping it a year early would have made all the difference for baseball’s best second-place team in history. Even without October glory, Bonds got his MVP trophy, and in his first year leading the dugout, Baker won the first of his three Manager of the Year awards.
Barry Bonds hits home runs No. 71, 72 and 73
Year in, year out, the Giants kept winning with Baker in the dugout and Bonds putting up unprecedented numbers at the plate. There were division titles — and quick postseason exits — in 1997 and 2000. Baker won his second and third NL Manager of the Year awards in those seasons, though the Giants fell short of a pennant both times.
By 2002, Bonds had become full Barry, perhaps the most devastating and divisive player in big league history. In 2001, though, it was just pure awe, with Bonds establishing the new home run record (73) while slugging .863. Eight. Sixty. Three.
With Baker watching from the dugout, Bonds broke the single-season home run record in San Francisco on Oct. 6, 2001. He hit Nos. 71 and 72 on the same night. Later, Bonds went on to break Aaron’s career mark.
To recap: Baker was on deck to witness his mentor, Aaron, breaking baseball’s most treasured record. He was teammates with McGwire, the man who broke the single-season home run mark held by Roger Maris. Then he managed Bonds, who broke the record again just three years later.
The Cubs’ curse continues with the Bartman Game
Ten years into his career with the Giants, Baker had done it all, except for the one big thing: winning a championship. He quickly realized he would not do so with San Francisco, who made little effort to keep him once Baker’s contract expired after the 2002 season.
Two weeks later, Baker got his next chance: He became the manager of the Chicago Cubs.
The Cubs team Baker took over was not a great one. Chicago had lost 95 games in 2002, and its premier player, slugger Sammy Sosa, was still productive but on the verge of a steep decline. It was also an old team. The standout unit on the club was a dynamic, hard-throwing rotation that featured Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, Carlos Zambrano and Matt Clement.
Much to the dismay of future critics, Baker leaned on his rotation hard in 2003. All four of his rotation stalwarts started at least 30 games and compiled more than 200 innings — they also were the main reason the Cubs won a soft NL Central and outlasted the Braves in a five-game NLDS. Chicago won the three games in that series started by Wood and Prior.
Amid stories of curses and billy goats, the Cubs found themselves up against the Florida Marlins in the NLCS, with everyone in Chicago salivating over a potential World Series matchup against either the Yankees or Red Sox.
Baker has never been under the microscope more than he was on Oct. 14, 2003, one of the most discussed games in baseball history — the Bartman Game, a contest remembered for a fan who bore little to no blame for the loss. That was on Baker and his team.
People now tend to forget a couple of things about this game. For one, Prior was dominant, an ace oozing pure pitching filth. We didn’t know then what would become of a career wrecked by injury. We only knew that he stifled the Marlins for seven innings in Game 6, putting the Cubs six outs away from the Fall Classic, and seemed all but invincible.
Then it all came apart. Prior faltered, the bullpen melted down and the team collapsed around them all as the Marlins plated eight stunning runs.
“It has nothing to do with the curse,” Baker said, always the pragmatist. “It has to do with fan interference and a very uncharacteristic error by [Alex] Gonzalez. History has nothing to do with this game, nothing.”
That leads to the other thing people now seem to forget: It wasn’t the last game. There was a Game 7 and the Cubs blew a lead in that game, too — in that case, with Wood leaving with an unsightly season-ending pitching line.
The Astros win it for Dusty
Baker enjoyed tremendous success in his stints as manager for Cincinnati (2008 to 2013) and Washington (2016 and 2017). He guided five more 90-win teams, all of which advanced to the postseason — none of which won a playoff series. He led more surefire Hall of Famers during these years, such as Joey Votto, Bryce Harper and Max Scherzer.
By the time Baker parted ways with the Nationals, he was 68 years old, and it really felt like he was done. The industry had moved to hiring younger, more analytically driven managers who were as much extensions of the front offices as they were maestros of the dugout. Baker was far from the only established skipper who didn’t seem to fit that mold.
Then, in the winter of 2019, one of the teams most responsible for the rise of quantitative baseball, the Astros, fell into disarray over an infamous sign-stealing scandal. Lead exec Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch lost their jobs amid the fallout.
Houston owner Jim Crane needed someone to restore a sense of order in his franchise, and the leader to whom he turned was Baker, 70, who had been working as a special adviser with the Giants.
“I’m extremely thankful for this opportunity,” Baker said in a team statement. “This is a great ballclub with outstanding players that know how to win.”
In his first postseason in Houston, Baker’s Astros recovered from a 29-31 pandemic season record to make it all the way to Game 7 of the ALCS before being shut down by former Astro Charlie Morton and the Rays’ bullpen.
In 2021, Houston roared back to the top of the AL, winning 95 games. Houston beat Boston in the ALCS, its fifth straight appearance in the series, giving Baker his second pennant winner. But still the big prize, the last résumé item missing from Baker’s picaresque journey, eluded him when the Braves beat Houston in a six-game World Series.
“It’s tough, but you know something, you’ve got to keep on trucking, and that gives you even more incentive next year,” Baker said. “It’s tough to take now, but this too shall pass.”
The 2022 Astros, Baker’s 26th team during his managerial career, turned out to be one of his best clubs. Houston won 106 games, the most of any Baker squad, even topping the win total of his first team in San Francisco. In the World Series, Baker’s Astros came up against a thing that had almost never existed through baseball history: a 6-seed, thanks to a new expanded wild card series.
Houston led the Philadelphia Phillies 3-2 coming into Game 6 on Nov. 5, 2022, the date Baker had been waiting for since he took over the Giants in the winter of 1992-93. So often, Baker’s postseason disappointments had come down to a Game 6.
Not this time. Yordan Alvarez shook the earth with a three-run moonshot over the batter’s eye at Minute Maid Park. Baker rode his hot starter, Framber Valdez, just long enough before turning things over to an airtight bullpen. Finally, when Kyle Tucker squeezed a Nick Castellanos foul fly in the ninth, it was over. The quest was done. The Astros were champs again, and Baker was a World Series-winning skipper.
Baker’s résumé, one of the most amazing in all of baseball, was complete. His ticket to Cooperstown, already a strong possibility, had moved into the realm of certainty. After the game, a questioner noted it had been 10,806 days since Baker managed his first game. He had just become the oldest manager to win a World Series.
“Had this happened years ago, I might not even be here,” Baker said. “So maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen so that I could hopefully influence a few young men’s lives and their families and a number of people in the country through showing what perseverance and character can do for you in the long run.”
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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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