Vanderbilt's Clark Lea understands the challenge Ole Miss presents on both sides of the ball

First-year Vanderbilt Coach Clark Lea understands the challenge that Ole Miss presents his team this Saturday in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium.

“They have an explosive offense and their defense is disruptive,” was the short answer Lea gave in his Wednesday SEC Football Coaches Teleconference. “They are a very good team with lots of weapons on both sides of the ball.”

Lea is very aware Ole Miss’ offense goes for broke on fourth down a lot, something he says the Dores will have to be keenly aware of in preparations.

“The way you address the downs is you have to shift back on. You treat second down as first down, third down as second down and fourth down as third down. You have to gear yourself to that mindset,” he explained. “We have to be aware of tendencies in terms of field location, situations that you know fourth down will become the money down, the conversion down.

“The advantage for going for it on fourth down like they do is that opponents have to rethink third down personnel packages knowing they may go for it on fourth down with a tempo down and we cannot substitute on fourth down. You can really get exposed if you aren’t smart with your personnel decisions. It’s a challenge, but you can structure around it to give your players a chance against fourth down tries and the go-for-it philosophy Ole Miss likes to use.”

Lea is impressed with the advancement this year of the Ole Miss defense as well.

“They are athletic, they have range, they have become disruptive. You can tell they have flourished in the system and are very confident. They are able to play loose and free because they have faith their offense is going to score a lot of points,” Lea noted. “We will have a challenge sustaining drives and finishing drive with points. 

“Ole Miss will try to make this a shootout and we will have to do what we can to try to keep that offense out of rhythm. That means our offense will have to execute at a high level against a very good defense to keep their offense off the field some.”

The Commodores are coming off a tough loss versus Kentucky on senior night at Vanderbilt.

“The game got away from us in the second quarter,” noted Lea, “with a touch sequence, but I was pleased with the way we played the second half in the 38-27 loss. We outscored Kentucky 14-3 in that half. Our finish exemplified what we have to be on both sides of the ball in order to win. We just need more of those kind of halves.

“We are charged up to go on the road and compete against the great challenge Ole Miss will give us. We’ve had a hard year so far, but our players are still eager to compete and that says a lot about their resiliency.”

Lea believes he’s in a good situation moving forward.

with the potential advantages of Vandy being a large metropolitan area that is growing by leaps and bounds and with the recent announcement of a $400 million athletic facilities commitment by the Commodores administration.

“Nashville is one of the fastest growing cities in the country and we are right in the middle of it,” he began. “You can throw a stone and get to a Fortune 500 company or Music Row. There’s a lot of industry here that is very receptive to us. We feel we can create partnerships with the Nashville community that could give us a great advantage in the NIL arena. As a department, we are fighting for those opportunities for our student-athletes. As long as we fight to improve our product on the field, those opportunities will come exponentially. It’s exciting and could be a great advantage to the Vanderbilt experience that we are just now scratching the surface on.

“The facilities announcement is a great statement in terms of the training of the team, first. We will be a state-of-the-art facility that will be tops in our league. We need to make sure our players have all the resources any other school in the SEC has to develop their talents and we will have that. Our players will have dreams of playing in the NFL too and we need to give them the tools to pursue those dreams. It’s a statement of support and investment that says we are in the next chapter of the total pursuit of excellence. We are already a top school educationally, in the middle of one of the fastest growing cities in the country, playing in the best conference in the nation and now we will have the facilities and the NIL opportunities to show prospects a pretty nice combination for their development as athletes, students and productive people.”