Commodores

Nashville, 18 November 1890: a Vanderbilt side playing its first game in existence beat the University of Nashville 40–0. It took another seven years for the team to get a name at all — a Nashville Banner writer, quarterback William E.

The name stuck. Between 1897 and 1921, Vanderbilt took the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association title outright eight times and shared it six more, then carried that into the Southern Conference in 1922 and 1923. Various selectors have credited the program with national championships across several of those seasons; the university itself has never claimed them.

What Vanderbilt has claimed, without interruption, is Tennessee. The rivalry goes back to 1892, and the Volunteers have had the better of it by a wide margin — 79 wins to 33, with five draws stretched across more than a century of meetings. The Commodores play their home games at FirstBank Stadium, a 40,550-seat ground that has also carried the names Vanderbilt Stadium and Dudley Field over the years, in black and gold that old-timers still call Old Gold.