Nashville, TENN--Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea has insulated himself.

The fourth-year head coach knows that his recruiting hit rate won't be perfect, but feels as if the challenge becomes less when it becomes purely about evaluation.

That doesn't take away the challenge, though.

"You look at talent acquisition at any level, even in the NFL, the hit rate is not close to what you’d want it to be," Lea said. "I think recruiting is even more challenging because we’re not drafting, so you have to have the pool of players is huge and now you’re trying to both find the ones that are interested in who you are and fit what you are and make sure that they can play at a high level too. You’re not always gonna be perfect."

When Lea has been far from perfect in his past is when he's let it get to him and when he's been swayed by external noise that has come in the form of recruiting rankings.

As a result, the Vanderbilt head coach has learned to trust his gut. While leading a program like his, that's the only way forward.

“I don’t pay attention to the recognition that the guys we recruit get," Lea said. "You can get drunk off that stuff sometimes and lose your ability to see it clearly."

"I will say when I’ve made a mistake it’s paying attention to the hype around a recruit or seeing ‘hey, we got a really high evaluated player’ and putting that ahead of that continued evaluation seeing 'is this the right fit?'"

As he's grown into his job, Lea has focused on that fit rather than the perception boost that his program could take from a swing on a commitment that looks to be a needle mover on the surface.

The surface often doesn't account for what Lea is looking for and what he's willing to work with.

"What we want to miss on is guys who love football who are dependable and tough, those guys will play for you no matter what," Lea said. "You get kinda excited about the perception boost and that’s human but what we’ve done is honed our process based off what we see producing successful results."

That process has been refined by the addition of general manager Barton Simmons to Lea's staff.

Simmons has been Jerry Kill like in his approach to correcting Vanderbilt's approach on the recruiting trail.

"He never hesitates to say ‘hey, I think we’re screwing this up,’" Lea said of Simmons. "Some of those mistakes where we’ve overvalued, he’s been a guy that has always pumped the brakes on those and so I know he’s seeing it the way he needs to see it.”

The way Simmons sees things has corrected the way Lea has. The pair has thrown out rankings, put their heads down and evaluated.

Lea hopes that an approach like that will bring its evaluations to light when they matter most despite recruiting classes that have consistently ranked at the bottom of the SEC.

"Every person we recruit we hope when they get here and they start to have the career that we know they can have then everyone is like ‘how did we miss that guy?’ if they didn’t offer him and what we want it to be is that we’ve beaten everyone we play against on a kid because he knows exactly what we’re doing.”