If Saturday afternoon’s football game between Tennessee and Vanderbilt inside Neyland Stadium was decided by the head coaches being quizzed on the rivalry, the Commodores would win in a runaway.
While Volunteers coach Josh Heupel was growing up in South Dakota and developing into a quarterback who would eventually guide the University of Oklahoma to the 2000 national championship, Commodores counterpart Clark Lea was raised in Nashville, attended Montgomery Bell Academy and viewed the Tennessee-Vanderbilt showdown as a must-see event.
“I’ve been a Vanderbilt fan since I was a child, so this game has always meant more,” Lea said in a news conference earlier this week. “I grew up in black and gold and cheering on the Commodores. When I got to play in the game, it had a heightened sense of meaning to me.”
Lea was a Vanderbilt fullback from 2002-04, which marked the final three years of Tennessee’s 22-game series win streak that started in 1983.
Although Heupel is a Tennessee-Vanderbilt outsider to this point, he does have players who can share some background and insight to the rivalry. The two programs have not only split the past 10 meetings but have scored the identical amount of points (273).