Sunday night, the LSU head coaching job became open, in a coaching carousel where Florida and Penn State are already open, Auburn and Florida State seem to be trending that way, and Steve Sarkisian might go to the NFL… and that’s before you get into the jobs that might open because their coach leaves, like, say, Ole Miss.
Clark Lea’s name is starting to come up in various coaching candidate lists put out by sportswriters who want clicks. To be clear, I’m not referring to paywall stuff that’s probably coming from legitimate sources; this is referring to the “here’s who I would consider if I were (brand-name school with a job opening)” articles that are written by people who are stuck in the old paradigm where only a handful of programs truly have unlimited resources and proximity to high school recruits is a bigger deal than it is in the NIL world. This is why there’s so much speculation about LSU and Florida fighting over who gets Lane Kiffin, when there is a very good chance that by December, Ole Miss will have as many College Football Playoff appearances as LSU and Florida combined.
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Vanderbilt is 7-1 and ranked 9th in this week’s AP Poll. They are playing at Texas this Saturday, and Texas is favored by something like 2.5 points — basically, a tossup game between the preseason #1 team in the country and Vanderbilt. This is a higher level than James Franklin ever had the Vanderbilt football program. More to the point, Vanderbilt beat LSU the week before, and that result was in no way a fluke: Vanderbilt is a better football team this season than LSU, and before you get the words “Diego Pavia” out of your mouth, Vanderbilt won that game by bullying LSU in the trenches. This is a thing that actually happened in college football in 2025, and it’s part of the reason why I am not particularly concerned about Lea going anywhere.
The reasons why Clark Lea would want to stay at Vanderbilt are pretty obvious. Not only did Lea play at Vanderbilt, he also played down the street at Montgomery Bell Academy in high school. At Montgomery Bell Academy, he met Barton Simmons, now the general manager for Vanderbilt football and more importantly a guy who Lea does not get to take with him if he takes another job, because Simmons is even less likely to leave Nashville than Lea is. Vanderbilt has the money to pay him, and unlike in years past, an administration actually willing to do it. The days when Eddie Fogler would leave for South Carolina because the athletic director wouldn’t give him a raise after he won National Coach of the Year are long gone. And unlike, well, some of the state schools in the SEC (including the two that currently have an opening for head football coach), Vanderbilt’s administration isn’t guaranteed to be a revolving door of political hacks because the state government can’t mess with it on the governor’s whims.
What made Vanderbilt an unwinnable job in the past was an administration that openly didn’t care about football, real hard limits on the amount of money that could be spent on football, an NCAA rulebook that deterred exactly one SEC school from paying players, and, let’s face it, a revolving door of coaches who had no business being head coaches in the SEC. (Which probably stemmed a lot from those first three things. It did not help that Vanderbilt thought bringing in the Cleveland Browns’ quarterback coach was the solution.) None of those things apply any more.
The only reason for Clark Lea to leave Vanderbilt, in 2025, is if he doesn’t think the current run is sustainable and wants to get out before he starts going 2-10 again. But that would say much more about Clark Lea than it would about Vanderbilt.
