Syracuse, N.Y. — Former Syracuse defensive back Steve Gregory recognizes two lessons delivered over the first three weeks of last season as critical to one of college football’s best stories of 2025.
Vanderbilt opened last year with an upset win over Virginia Tech, a team considered a dark horse candidate to win the ACC at the start of last year.
Gregory, Vanderbilt’s second-year defensive coordinator, said he believed the Commodores could win big games when he was hired before the 2024 season.
But while the Hokies weren’t as good as advertised, that game was the start of the entire program knowing, not just believing, that winning big was possible at Vanderbilt.
“I think realizing this program could be turned around started last year,” Gregory said. “When I first got here you see the lack of success they had. But then you see how the roster was built. I think the pivotal moment was going and winning that game against a team that was considered to be a playoff-caliber team. That jump-started the belief that the culture is right, what we’re teaching is right, what we’re trying to do is right. You saw a buy-in from the whole organization.”
Two weeks later another lesson was learned, this one a more painful version, delivered in the form of a loss to Georgia State, which went on to a 3-9 record.
The lesson, Gregory said, was a reminder that Vanderbilt is a program that must always get the small details right.
“That was a tough moment but a needed moment,” Gregory said. “If you don’t win the margins in every moment, if you’re not doing everything right, living the right lifestyle and practicing the right habits, any team in the country can beat you.”
One week after the loss to Georgia State, Vanderbilt took the No 7. team in the country to overtime in a loss to Missouri. The following week the Commodores beat Alabama for the first time since 1984, and students celebrated by memorably marching the goal posts more than two miles from Vandy’s football stadium to the Cumberland River.
All of that has carried over into this season, where the Commodores sit at 8-2 and are likely the second-best story in college football behind unbeaten Indiana.
Vanderbilt, a program that went five straight seasons without a league win in the ’70s and was the SEC pincushion for the majority of the next four decades, is No. 14 in the College Football Playoff rankings and within striking distance of the first playoff appearance in school history.
The school has never won 10 games in a season. It hasn’t won nine games before a bowl game since 1915.
It has a chance to do both this season, and its current run is dotted with Syracuse connections.
Head coach Clark Lea spent three seasons at SU on the staff of head coach Scott Shafer. Special teams coordinator and tight ends coach Jeff LePak was an analyst under Dino Babers.
Some of Lea’s abilities were evident under Shafer. Syracuse’s linebackers routinely punched over their expected weight-class during that time with Cam Lynch, Parris Bennett, Zaire Franklin and Dyshawn Davis among those who excelled.
For 2015, Shafer’s final year, Gregory joined as a quality control coach, his first job in coaching.
Originally from Staten Island, Gregory played four years at Syracuse, three under Paul Pasqualoni and one under Greg Robinson, before carving out an eight-year NFL career as an undrafted free agent with the San Diego Chargers and the Bill Belichick-led New England Patriots.
At Syracuse he was named a freshman All-American after breaking up 21 passes in 2002. He remains tied for second on SU’s all-time list for career passes defended with 40. He was a special teams standout and occasionally played on offense.
On Shafer’s staff, Lea and Gregory clicked, two football-centric individuals who found they could discuss defensive philosophy for hours.
“We’re both really football-minded guys,” Gregory said. “I think the way we see the game and strive to continue to be curious about the game and how to evolve, to be open to new ideas about how to improve, our thought-process is similar. When we get together and talk ball, defense in particular, the conversations get long and pretty exciting for us.”
Lea went from Syracuse to Wake Forest and Notre Dame before landing a job leading his alma mater. Gregory spent those years in the NFL, where he coached defensive backs with the Detroit Lions and Miami Dolphins.
Lea, now in his fifth season, took over defensive play-calling duties to start the 2024 season. The switch followed a year in which his team finished 2-10 and 129th out of 133 teams in the country in points allowed. He brought in Gregory to serve as his right hand.
This season, he turned over play-calling duties to a mind he trusts.
During Gregory’s first full year calling plays, Vanderbilt’s defense ranks 51st in the country and 10th in the SEC, allowing 22.2 points per game and largely matching its performance from last year when Lea was calling the shots.
There are similarities in the struggles faced by Vanderbilt and the ones that have engulfed Syracuse football for the past three decades, Gregory acknowledged.
Football has been an uphill battle at both private schools, and each of the programs needs to believe again before they can win again. Both have recently invested in facilities after spending years falling behind.
“They’re in a good conference, they play high-level football, there’s an attractiveness for some kids to step in and play early and at a high level,” said Gregory, who noted that the excitement of living in Nashville does provide the Commodores a boost compared to Central New York.
“I don’t know much about Fran Brown, but from what I’ve seen he’s done a good job adding talent and recruiting and trying to build a winning program.”
Brown has talked this season about wanting to build a program at Syracuse and wanting to do it through high school recruiting.
That is considered a necessity at both schools, where the bidding wars required to create a roster overnight are unlikely to be won often enough to serve as the foundation of the program.
Vanderbilt’s roster includes a number of players from a 2022 recruiting class that was unusually strong by Vanderbilt standards, ranking 32nd nationally, the second-best for Vanderbilt in the recruiting rankings era.
Brown’s initial recruiting class in 2024 was ranked the best for Syracuse in the rankings era. This year’s is poised to be better. The recruiting uptick has provided many Syracuse fans belief, or at least hope, that something similarly special can happen here.
While Lea built the bones of Vanderbilt’s team using traditional recruiting, his portal acquisitions have been excellent, including landing game-changing, dual-threat quarterback Diego Pavia before last season.
The Commodores scoured all levels of college football and brought in 20 transfers as opposed to just 13 high school recruits.
The number of transfers was pretty typical for a Power-Four program, but the high school class was the smallest in the country for a Power-Four program, a testament to the number of players the Commodores retained from last season.
The small high school class served as an early signal that Vanderbilt was all-in on taking advantage of this window, when it had a chance to punch through with a special quarterback.
“You have to have a balance of both,” Gregory said of recruiting traditionally and in the transfer portal. “You have to have a balance of maintaining your guys that are the nucleus of the team. We wanted to maintain the core group that were important to us winning and then bring in guys that were a culture fit and good football players.”
Vanderbilt’s season shows how historically downtrodden programs have to be prepared to maximize their moments when they arrive.
The Commodores’ leading tackler this season was recruited out of high school in its Class of 2023, but its highest-graded defenders, according to Pro Football Focus, have been pulled from BYU, Southeast Missouri State, Northern Illinois and Tennessee.
On offense, Vanderbilt is led by a quarterback (Pavia) and leading pass catcher (Eli Stowers) who came to Vanderbilt from New Mexico State.
The Commodores’ final two games of the year come against Kentucky and Tennessee, a pair of winnable games that could provide just enough juice for Vanderbilt to continue its unlikely season in the College Football Playoff.
It all started the way a rebuild of this magnitude has to, Gregory said.
First, Vanderbilt had to believe.
“There’s no reason we can’t win in this program,” Gregory said. “Just come in with confidence and breathe that into your players, get them to believe in the fact that anything is possible with hard-work and determination and the right approach.”
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