HOOVER, Ala. — Vanderbilt football coach Derek Mason decided a little punctuation lesson was in order to describe the Commodores entering his second season.
“The season we had a year ago was a comma,” Mason said Monday as the Southeastern Conference opened its annual Media Days event. “It’s a comma and not a period. This football team has definitely done the things that we need to do in order to get ourselves back on track and be exactly what we want to be.”
The Commodores produced exclamation points under previous coach James Franklin, who went 24-15 in three seasons, including consecutive 9-4 marks in 2012 and 2013. Mason was enjoying a successful run as Stanford’s defensive coordinator when he was tabbed to replace Franklin, who left for Penn State, but last year was a disaster from the start.
Vanderbilt opened with a stunning 37-7 home loss to Temple and never recovered, finishing 3-9 overall and winless in league play.
“It was definitely frustrating,” senior center Spencer Pulley said. “When you go through the season, you try to take it one game at a time, just going from one week to the next, but at the end of the season, it was hard to look back.”