I have a complicated relationship with hope, at least when it comes to college football. Growing up watching dreadful Vanderbilt teams that could, at most, fall just short of an Independence Bowl bid keeps you from dreaming big.

Optimism was never an issue, even during the low points. Optimism isn’t a tangible thing, anyways, and it doesn’t cost anything to think that something good will happen before a game starts, even if there’s always a small voice in the back of your head that knows the backbreaking fumble, the false start on 3rd and four, or the wobbly field goal attempt that doinks off the left upright is coming.

Even in the seasons when Vanderbilt broke through and won a few games here and there, it felt less like some grand cosmic realignment and more like an accident of the universe – a small rock falling close enough to earth’s atmosphere that it burns up and all we see on the ground is a shooting star.

I’ve told this story before, here and too many times in person, but I was in mixed company with friends who went to Georgia and Vanderbilt, where we found ourselves watching a miserable Vanderbilt-Purdue game in the dreadful 2019 season. Somewhere around the time Rondale Moore caught his seventh of 13 passes, a Georgia friend asked the group: “Do you guys enjoy watching this?”

The answer that day was decidedly no, but often enough there have been miracles among us.

Vanderbilt-Tennessee is one of those funny rivalries that can only exist in college football, one that has a Wikipedia page but no name. There is no Iron Bowl or Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, and not even a fun unofficial moniker like Farmageddon. No one has tried to name it The Dollybowl or even something generic like The Governor’s Cup Presented by Pilot/Flying J. There certainly isn’t a trophy to parade around the field afterwards.

This is a game that means more to one team than any other on the schedule, but nothing more than potential embarrassment for the other. A game that has been played 119 times, almost always at the end of the year with the other important ones, but has very rarely held a matchup with any specific meaning.

Tennessee has won 79 of the matchups, Vanderbilt just 33. Since the Great Depression began, the Commodores have come out on top just 14 times.

I still remember the first time Vanderbilt won in my life – the miraculous 2005 game where Jay Cutler found Earl Bennett in the checkered endzone of Neyland Stadium with just over a minute left in the game. Watching the grainy Jefferson Pilot broadcast in the living room with my Dad, who was there the last time Vanderbilt had won in 1982, is still seared into my memory.

A small, but not forgotten detail of the game felt like a wink from the universe. The Commodores played all season with “DOT1” on the bumpers of their gold helmets in memory of running back Kwane Doster, who had been tragically killed the Christmas Day before and wore number 1. Even Jay Cutler was emotional talking about the moment when he looked up at the scoreboard after the touchdown and saw that the time read 1:11.

Vanderbilt didn’t win the game in 2008, but it did do something that 2005 team couldn’t: qualify for a bowl. In this instance, that meant a trip down Broadway to the Music City Bowl.

It was the coldest game I’ve ever been to, with December winds blowing off the Cumberland River into the upper decks of what was then Nissan Stadium. I often tell people it was six degrees outside that day, something that has turned to fact in my head even if it wasn’t ever quite true.

True to form, the game was miserable and miserably fun. Vanderbilt won 16-14, and punter Brett Upson won the MVP award. He absolutely deserved it, averaging nearly 43 yards on his nine(!) punts. 

Everything is beautiful in its time.

I was there for the next win, standing on the field with a press pass this time. Andre Hal and Jordan Rodgers led a dominating performance in 2012, one that inspired my History of Country Music Professor to ask a pointed extra credit question on our final exam: 

What was the saddest recorded instance of Rocky Top being played?

A. Following Cordarelle Patterson’s punt return for a touchdown at Vanderbilt Stadium with 6:15 left in a 41-18 loss on November 18, 2012

There wasn’t a second option, which felt fitting. Much as things were different during the James Franklin era, so much of the winning seemed like a mirage born from the failures of the SEC East’s giants. Derek Dooley was finally finished in Knoxville, while Georgia and Florida weren’t anywhere near their program apexes in the near past and futures. 

As much as can be true, a three-score rivalry win and consecutive bowl games were not works of our own, no matter how joyful they were.

Patton Robinette wasn’t even supposed to be on the field in 2013. Austyn Carta-Samuels had been the better quarterback all year, even when he wasn’t totally healthy.

I was there again, this time in some 200-level section of Neyland Stadium, trying my best to politely cheer for each Vanderbilt first down without catching the eye of any of the increasingly irritated Tennessee fans in my section. My dad and I dressed as inconspicuously as we could in black, bundled up in a freezing Knoxville night, and laughed through the 45 videos featuring Peyton Manning that played on the LED screens.

It was an ugly game, one that Tennessee led 10-7 for nearly the entire second half. They tried one of the most numbskulled fake field goals you will ever see. And then, with under a minute left, a real miracle happened. 

Carta-Samuels, hobbled by a knee injury, was in the game to run a quarterback sneak. He was marked short. In the nascent days of instant replay, SEC officials overturned the call – in favor of Vanderbilt.

And then, this:

It’s almost funny to watch now. Nothing about the play particularly works, other than that Robinette scores. The playaction doesn’t pull any linebackers in, the fake jump pass doesn’t create any space, there just isn't anyone there at the end to stop him from ambling into that checkerboard endzone. 

The one thing I’ll never forget about the moment, that TV and the replays never quite adequately capture, is the sound – and, paradoxically, there is a sound – of 100,000 people going silent all at once.

I don’t want to zoom past the three-game winning streak from 2016-18, but you’ve got the idea by now and the truth is that I just don’t remember much about those games anymore. Allegedly, Kyle Shurmur was prominently involved. The small wins, as fun as they were, never added up to the hope that much more was on the table. At least not the way the sport ran back then.

I couldn't help but laugh when the SEC unveiled its new scheduling format beach in September, with each team in the increasingly unwieldy conference getting three named “permanent rivals” in addition to six rotating games.

The idea of anything being permanent in college football is fundamentally farcical – SMU plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference now, while sitting more than 300 miles away from any kind of coast (in this case, Galveston and that dirty water).

Even in the SEC, stable as it has been, we’re on at least the third announcement of permanent rivals since the league split into divisions in 1992.

At one time, the oldest rivalry in the proto-SEC, the Southern Conference, was Vanderbilt and in-state Sewanee. In fact, if you look at the Wikipedia listing for Division I rivalry games, you’ll see that Sewanee-Vanderbilt is somewhere around the 10th oldest. The schools played 52 times, with Vanderbilt winning 40 of those (a winning percentage better than even Tennessee’s over Vanderbilt). Legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice called the 1907 tilt between the teams the greatest thrill he’s ever witnessed at a sporting event.

And then, one day, they just stopped. Of those ten oldest rivalry games, it’s the only one that isn’t still ongoing. Like most of college football, permanent became “permanent,” and Sewannee faded away. There are breaking points in the history of the sport, and you hope we aren't at one right now.

We should introduce the current cast, at this point, and why none of them should have been here.

Let’s start with the coach. Clark Lea probably should have been fired two years ago. At least, at any other SEC school he would have been. Two two-win seasons sandwiched a glistening 5-7 year to begin his tenure as head coach of his alma mater, but his teams suffered from the same problem as all the Vanderbilt teams before them: talent could only really flow upstream in the last era of college football.

Before NIL and the transfer portal reached the current stage of evolution, it was impossible to bridge the talent gap at a school like Vanderbilt. Any freshman with a promising season could transfer to a better-resourced rival, but no one was leaving a starting spot at a power team to come to Nashville.

The same felt true at points during this season – Lea might have done what James Franklin and Gerry DiNardo before him had, and turned a good season into a bigger job elsewhere. Happily, this morning, the school announced that this ride will continue.

Armed with enough patience from an administration that rarely prioritized sports, much less football, Lea did something bold. He brought in Jerry Kill from New Mexico State, a grizzled veteran known for jump-starting moribund programs, as a kind of spiritual advisor. 

Kill definitely shouldn’t have been here, having twice retired from the sport for health reasons.

Kill brought a number of staffers with him, including offensive coordinator Tim Beck (no, not that Tim Beck) and his playbook resembling something from an EA Sports fever dream.

They also brought a quarterback who nobody thought would be here.

One of the great things about Diego Pavia is his delusion of how great he is and how great he can be, and yet, at what point does it stop being delusional?

That isn’t something I wrote, it’s a direct quote from Vanderbilt GM Barton Simmons, given to The New York Times. Even people inside the building can't believe this is working. 

I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on why Pavia is so good. I first remember him as a brazen bowling ball of a runner at New Mexico State, where his wrestling background was more apparent than any higher quarterback pedigree.

This is a compliment, but a complicated one: I think he plays like the kid on a U6 soccer field who watches Liverpool games with his dad every Saturday. He isn’t bigger or stronger or faster than anyone, and it’s not even that he possesses some unique skill or ability to read the defense that he can deploy to create space. He just seems to be the only person on the field who knows exactly where the ball needs to go, and how to get it there.

His play style and temperament don't particularly feel like they belong at little Vanderbilt, something that grates on conference rivals like no one has since Franklin. And, like no one before him at the school, he should find himself at the Downtown Athletic Club in New York.

And still, he was truly and fully human. This might be his last year, or he might return again.

This season shouldn't have worked, either. Every game on the schedule is a ghost of Commodores past, where the backbreaking fumble, the false start on 3rd and four, or the wobbly field goal attempt that doinks off the left upright should have been coming.

A halftime deficit against Virginia Tech should have undone all the progress from last season and announced that a bowl appearance would be a stretch. South Carolina should have been a showcase for then-Heisman contender LaNorris Sellers. Georgia State and Utah State were plucky G5 teams that could have won sloppy games filled with turnovers, just like the Panthers did last year. LSU should have finally put together the talented pieces of a potential title contender and bullied the lines. Missouri should have been the SEC dark horse that announced its playoff intentions were real. Auburn should have rallied around an interim coach and finished the job with a new offensive gameplan that finally showcased the NFL wide receivers on the roster. Kentucky could have clinched a bowl bid following a month of spirited play against a suddenly faltering defense.

But, when presented with every opportunity to fail, this team has instead pushed forward. Even the two losses were just losses, and those happen to good teams, too. They’re still alive for the biggest prize in the sport, one that even the greatest sense of optimism couldn't have imagined four months ago.

Ten is a meaningless number. It’s only important because it’s how many toes we have, so we built an entire numerical structure around it. But ten is also a big number. Vanderbilt has never won ten games in a season. Never. They could do it on Saturday, and I think they will.

I don’t know how long this lasts. I don’t know if I’ll still feel this way by halftime. Even if we win, I don't know that we’ll get into the playoff, or have a chance to do anything but win yet another Music City Bowl. But right now, I feel like this is a different program, one that can continue to win, even when Diego leaves. I feel hope.