Georgia walloped Vanderbilt from start to finish, and here are some thoughts on that.

What happened today was fairly predictable and almost impossible to watch. The game was decided as close to the opening whistle as maybe any football game I’ve ever covered and so I’m not going to spend a lot of time analyzing stuff that happened because from a Vanderbilt standpoint, there's little good that anyone can meaningfully take away.

I'll talk about some on-field things by also commenting on some other stuff that also matters

As for stuff that happened on the field:

1. What does this team have to do to start well? Today that was probably as much due to the difference in talent in 1s on 1s, but after giving up touchdowns on the first two possessions last week, it happened again… and then some.

The Commodores ran on first down for no gain, got a false start penalty before the next snap, threw a short pass that Chris Pierce dropped on the next play, then, on third-and-15, ran Rocko Griffin straight into an unblocked Georgia defender for a one-yard gain. After a short punt, Georgia got the ball at the Vandy 49 and without a whole lot of effort, got a touchdown give snaps later on an end-around to its tight end.

After a three-play, four-yard drive, Vandy punted and six plays later, Georgia had another score and led 14-0 with 8:02 left in the first quarter.

It got worse. Vanderbilt fumbled the ensuing kickoff and Georgia returned it inside the Vandy 5, then, a Ken Seals pick set up another score and Georgia had 28 points as Vandy had 11 total yards. That became 35 a few minutes later and Vandy didn’t pick up its first first down until the drive that followed.

2. Marlen Sewell picked up a tackle on the first drive. That was his first collegiate action. He was followed by Devin Lee and Marcus Bradley in the second quarter. Had you asked me in August which freshmen would be on the field early, I’d say those would have been three of the top 10 or so, and we’d already seen a few of the others (James Ziglor III, Patrick Smith and Quincy Skinner would have been on that list, too, and they’d already played coming into today.

Those guys are more physically talented than some of the guys in front of them, so as long as no one’s confidence gets killed, that’s the right move.

3. I don’t know what they do at quarterback going forward. Mike Wright was in by the second quarter and obviously is the team’s most mobile option, though the staff also went back to Seals later.

Neither did anything meaningful. The line can’t protect anyone long enough to generate a respectable passing game, so I’m not sure how much it matters but obviously that’s a storyline to follow going forward.

As for the non-football stuff...

Downward spirals seem impossible to escape when you're inside them. Past history and a bad culture are always working against you. Right now, the fan base doesn’t feel good about much. As a wise friend once told me, you don’t usually run a car into a ditch with one dramatic turn, it’s a series of small, uncorrected turns instead.

In a nutshell, that’s a history of Vanderbilt football since 1960. But that plays out in other ways, too.

The fan experience must have been miserable for the 6,000 or so Vandy fans there today. I get texts from fans basically every game about something with the game-day experience—parking costs that more than doubled, nobody knowing where to find the game on radio (or not being able to hear it once they do), the play clock going out, etc. And while I can understand the decision to increase basketball ticket prices given that tickets are cheaper than most places combined with departmental revenue needs, there’s also a glaring lack of self-awareness when that’s done following four-straight last-place SEC finishes.

Some of these things, to one degree or another, happen other places. And sometimes they aren’t big deals other places, because there's winning at those places, and winning cures about everything.

I keep hearing about how chancellor Daniel Diermeier is sincere about changing things, and I don’t doubt that he is. Diermeier has a terribly tough task there, with many things working against him for his willingness to take that on, and there should be grace for that. But that same downward spiral is going to cast doubt on his efforts, too, until he gives folks something that's tangible improvement. (To Diermier's credit, he took the plunge of change with what was probably an expensive coaching change, and that's at least something, but whether that's improvement or not remains to be seen.)

And this isn’t a shot at everyone who works in the AD—it’s got good, hard-working people there in places for sure—but if you took an audit: How many folks there have seen how things work at functional, Power Five programs? How many have worked in organizations known for world-class customer service?

The implications from that aren’t hard to follow. The question is whether Diermeier has the guts to push for a cultural change at a place where hiring decisions are almost always guided by the concept of “the best person for Vanderbilt,” and longevity guided by one’s ability not to rock the boat.