AP photo by George Walker IV / Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier looks up at the stands before a home football game against LSU on Oct. 3.NASHVILLE – Vanderbilt University is looking for a football coach, and the school’s chancellor and athletic director want to make clear that person will have a say in how the school improves its facilities.
And Vanderbilt will be ready to spend money to make those improvements not only reality, but worthy of being a charter member of the Southeastern Conference.
“We can do a lot,” Daniel Diermeier, who took over as chancellor in July, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “And we have an enormous amount of assets, and we need to bring them, we need to leverage them in order to advance athletics at the university as a whole.”
Vanderbilt fired Derek Mason on Nov. 29 after the Commodores lost the first eight games of his seventh season as head coach. Athletic director Candice Lee – she was named to the post on an interim basis in February, but the school removed that label three months later – said this gives Vanderbilt a chance to show its commitment to competing in the SEC.
The SEC’s lone private university has the league’s smallest football stadium, which had its last major renovations in 1981.
AP photo by Mark Humphrey / Vanderbilt lines up against Florida on Nov. 21 in Nashville.Lee played basketball for the Commodores, with her career including two trips to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight. Diermeier is a native of Germany and a fan of professional soccer club Borussia Mönchengladbach in the Champions League. He also has worked at Stanford and Northwestern in his career as a university administrator, seeing how each paired academic and athletic success as a member of the Pac-12 and Big Ten, respectively.
Diermeier said assessing the situation was his first task at Vanderbilt, where he came after serving as provost at the University of Chicago – now a Division III school but also where Jay Berwanger was the first Heisman Trophy winner in 1935.
“Vanderbilt is a place with a very strong culture and with a very strong sense of values, and we believe that college athletics can be a very important part for our university,” Diermeier said. “There are very few other things that can bring a university together as much as athletics, that can create a sense of community.”
Both Diermeier and Lee said Vanderbilt also has work to better connect with its fans and alumni. Lee said they’re being very intentional and strategic.
“Everything that we’re doing is deliberate with a clear vision and an end goal in mind,” she said.
Diermeier also sees men’s basketball as an area for improvement. Coach Jerry Stackhouse is in his second season after taking over a program that lost 26 straight SEC games before snapping that skid in February. The Commodores play in Memorial Gym, which is the conference’s oldest basketball arena.
Diermeier said the new football coach will be a partner in building the program and deciding what investments are needed to help athletes on and off the field. Vanderbilt built an indoor practice facility in 2013 under coach James Franklin, who left after that season to take over at Penn State, having led the Commodores to back-to-back 9-4 records after going 6-7 in 2011, his first year in Nashville.
“I would love to invest in a way where the facilities support our student-athletes and signal to them that we’re serious and that we want to compete and that we want to compete at the highest level,” Diermeier said. “That’s the right message.”
Over the past couple decades, Vanderbilt has unveiled plans to upgrade the football stadium, with results mostly focused on cosmetic changes.
“People need to see where’s the beef and, you know, proof of the pudding,” Diermeier said. “And that’s completely reasonable. And I understand that. And I understand that there has been disappointment and a long time of disappointment.”
Offensive coordinator Todd Fitch was named interim coach of the football team after Mason’s dismissal. The Commodores have not played since Mason’s final game, a 41-0 loss at Missouri on Nov. 28, but they are set to host Tennessee on Saturday and visit Georgia on Dec. 19 to complete this year’s all-SEC schedule, a product of the COVID-19 pandemic.