How Clark Lea and Vanderbilt knocked off No. 1 Alabama
"I want this city to celebrate this," the Nashville native and Vanderbilt alum told The Inside Zone.
First, a quick Clark Lea story. Last summer in his office, he went out of his way to show me a faded old hat that said “Journey” on it. He gave a long anecdote about how he ended up wearing that hat while sick, how Vanderbilt notched its first SEC win under him that week, and how that hat now has a special place in his office because of what it represented.
Toward the end of our conversation Saturday, I had to ask him: Any mementos for this one?
“There’s an inevitability to success when you stay in the fight,” Lea said by phone. “And we've kind of gotten rid of a lot of our trinkets and a lot of our good luck charms, because we don’t think we need them anymore. We just need to go play good football.”
That they did.
This one was Vanderbilt 40, Alabama 35.
No. 1 Alabama.
The same Alabama that handed Lea his last loss as Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator the day before he was introduced as Vanderbilt’s new head coach in 2020.
The same Alabama that had just beaten then-No. 2 Georgia in an instant classic, unofficially turning the page from the Nick Saban Era and into the Kalen DeBoer Era.
Saban was fond of the phrase “rat poison” after big wins. DeBoer doubled down with mouse traps around the Crimson Tide’s facility this week.
Maybe the Tide stepped right into it. Maybe it didn’t matter.
The Commodores were just better on Saturday. And while no one outside of Nashville could have seen this coming, the final tally was irrefutable.