Jan. 12, 2007
Commodore Notebook Archive – click here
You own a busy diner. It’s been in the family for well over 100 years. Business is steady and good until one day you hear McDonald’s is coming in just down the street a few blocks. Pretty soon there is a Wendy’s, a Cracker Barrel and some other giants within shouting distance.
What do you do? You realize it will be difficult to compete on price since the new competition can get quantity discounts that you can’t. It is apparent that you can’t out-promote these guys, who all have multi-million dollar advertising budgets.
Your answer comes to you one sleepless night. You don’t try to become a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s wanna-be. That route always puts you in a reactive, weak posture. You understand that your best chance for success is to highlight and embrace the differences between your place and theirs, knowing that after the early hoop-la calms down that your old customers will remember your service and history of offering good value.
That metaphor may not be right-on target but it came to mind when I read Alabama was hiring a coach at about $4 million annually over an eight-year span. Not chump change. It came to mind when the Florida Gators won their second major NCAA title in less than a year. No chump accomplishment. How does a small, private institution such as Vanderbilt keep pace when the competition can out-bid the NFL for personnel talent or hold the two most coveted national championships at the same time?
The answer to me is clear; we must define and embrace our differences. Just as we understood we could likely never “out-Titan” the Titans with lavish game productions and highly financed professional trappings, we will not be lured into an uncontrolled bidding war for coaching talent. It’s doubtful we will ever be the reigning football and men’s basketball national champions at the same time.
But instead of throwing up our hands in defeat, we should remind ourselves that people win championships, not payrolls and not history. There are enough talented student-athletes who are or would be interested in Vanderbilt for some of the things it has that other schools don’t (world class academics and the great city of Nashville to name two) for us to be successful.
In many ways, we already are. A recent article suggested that Vanderbilt was only competitive with the University of Tennessee in men’s basketball and cited head-to-head results in football and women’s basketball.
Funny, no mention about great competition in sports such as baseball (where Tim Corbin has a winning record since his arrival five years ago), tennis, golf or soccer. We have certainly held our own on these battlefields.
Do we have work to do? Yep. Is it easy to compete in the SEC? Nope. That’s OK, too. The kind of kid attracted to Vanderbilt usually isn’t looking for shortcuts. Same for coaches; we have a terrific coaching staff and all of them like working with true student-athletes. Different strokes for different folks.
We are located in what is easily the Southeastern Conference’s most attractive city. Our campus is beautiful, the weather good. We are rated higher academically in the WORLD than our SEC brethren are ranked in the nation. That makes a difference to some people.
I have a hunch that deep down, there are a lot of people who admire the Vanderbilts of the world for their principled positions, rather than those institutions that seem to have lost a grip on the very definition of “collegiate athletics”. Winning is important here and it always will be. Being different doesn’t mean we don’t care about the scoreboard.
We just have a different idea as to how to get there. And that will make all the difference.