VandySports's Chris Lee covered Vanderbilt's spring game and most of its spring practices. Here are five things that stood out from the start of practice in February through the April 7 spring game.

The defensive line looks more like an SEC defensive line than it has in a while.

After some time to process what I saw in the spring game and on Saturday night, that might be my biggest takeaway. Fans saw some of that in the spring game, where Darren Agu was a play-making force at times and Yilanan Outtara showed some things too. That wasn’t a first on either count. Devin Lee has gotten better as he’s gotten healthier. Daevion Davis was well enough to be out there, and so was Christian James. Both have contributed on a Southeastern Conference stage before. Stanford transfer Aeneas DeCosmo made plays this spring. BJ Diakate missed a lot of the spring, but can help. Oh, and there’s Nate Clifton, who’s probably played more snaps than any of those guys, and if I recall correctly, graded as Vandy’s best lineman on Pro Football Focus the last two years.

And hopefully Bradley Mann and Miles Capers, who missed all spring, are back health this fall after surgery.

Let’s not go crazy and start anointing this as an upper-third-of-the-SEC defensive line or something like that. Maybe it won’t even be middle of the pack. But it’s a long way from hands-down-worst-in-the-SEC, where it’s spent most of the last decade. I think you’ll see tangible improvement here and that should show up on the scoreboard in 2023.

My biggest concern is probably the secondary.

Yes, De’Rickey Wright had a pick-6 in the spring game, but he was also chasing down a receiver who got behind him once or twice. And yes, BJ Anderson didn’t play, and he’d have helped too. But there were too often guys running wide open in the secondary and that was without Will Sheppard playing much.

I thought more guys were way out of position in the spring game than they were throughout most of spring practice. But even when they were in position, they just didn’t make enough plays (there were a lot of dropped picks in spring practice, and that showed up again in the spring game.)

When multiple walk-on receivers make multiple good plays most days—and you saw that in the spring game, too—I think that begs a lot of fair questions. And we definitely need to see more of the guys we thought would make plays to be making them in August.

Will Sheppard’s the best player on the team. Sheppard wasn’t featured prominent in the spring or the spring game, because the Commodores know what he can do and wanted to manage his load. But when Sheppard was in there, he was a handful to cover, and nobody really did much of that successfully all spring. If you’re a Vanderbilt fan, you probably had an idea of what Sheppard could do already, but it might be time to consider his good 2022 campaign as something approximating a floor for 2023 and expect the ceiling to be a couple of notches higher than that. And what that could easily look like is first-team All-SEC season.

It's still a major concern, but, the running game showed some life on Saturday night.

If you’re worried about the offense, a chief foundation of that would be placed on the running game. I wasn’t blown away with what I saw this summer and I have a feeling the loss of Ray Davis will leave a bit of a mark, even if Davis wasn’t a breakaway back and did more his damage four yards at a time.

The biggest encouragements on Saturday night came from Sedrick Alexander and Chase Gillespie, both of him showed the ability to break off 10-12 yard runs. Whether there’s more beyond that remains to be seen, but Saturday night’s display was certainly better than I saw some days in practice.

That puts Patrick Smith in the spotlight come this fall. Smith didn’t have a great spring and will need to step up his play if he doesn’t want to fall behind those others.

It’s the deepest quarterback bunch I remember at Vanderbilt.

He wasn’t great on Saturday, but AJ Swann should be better in his second year as a starter. It’s a shame for Ken Seals that what was probably his worst day of the spring came in front of everyone. The same might be true of Drew Dickey. Walter Taylor, meanwhile, did display some of the flashes we saw in big plays in the spring game.

Bottom line: the group was pretty accurate all spring, it has two guys who’ve shown flashes of great play in real games, a third quarterback who’d probably start for some teams I’ve covered, and a No. 4 who’s raw but seems to have good upside.

Some years, you’re hard-pressed to find much excitement about any QB in Vandy’s roster. This year, you can find something to like with four.