How practice incident showed Vanderbilt football is playing with an edge

Nashville Tennessean
On the last play of Vanderbilt football's Monday practice, things got a little chippy.
Coach Clark Lea addressed the team after the minor altercation, wanting to make sure lapses in discipline wouldn't carry over to a real game. While it was a teachable moment, Lea said the implications weren't all negative.
"It's spirited play that crosses lines," Lea said. "And again, I'd rather coach a team back than forward. This team is, especially the O-line and D-line, we're playing with edge, and when you play with edge there's potential for emotions to get the better of us, and I thought we had a pretty good day honestly with that.
"At the end we crossed lines and for me in the moment, it's both teaching the response of mechanism of winning football, to not go across the line so that we're not drawing penalties so that we can allow the opponent's lack of discipline to be an advantage for us. It's also about de-escalation to me. We're going hard at each other, we want to practice a certain way, a certain style we have to to get better. But in the moment where the temperature's rising, we need to be able to listen to our leadership, de escalate and continue without any issues."
Though the practice incident was the first for the Commodores in preseason practice, Lea said he felt the team is playing with more edge in his third season than in the first two. Experience among the offensive and defensive lines helps with that, too. Four starters on the offensive line return, as do several experienced defensive linemen including Nate Clifton, Daevion Davis, Darren Agu, Christian James and Devin Lee.
Davis, who appeared in only one game in 2022 after suffering a torn ACL at the end of the 2021 season, and Clifton are both part of Lea's leadership council.
"With (defensive line coach Larry) Black rolling in last year and now this year, we have such an edge it's such a chip on our shoulder to the best unit in the country," Davis said. "And we preach it every day and he helps us and pushes all our buttons that we have and it kind of just lights a match under us. We have such an edge and it's awesome to compete against an O-line like that."
Prior to the practice incident, Vanderbilt − which brought in local referees for the scrimmage − had largely avoided major disciplinary issues, with just a handful of procedural penalties.