College football’s a weird sport. The entire regular season consists of 12 games, which is an incredibly small sample size compared to... well, pretty much any other sport. The short schedule means that who you played, and when you played them, makes an outsized difference. A baseball team can have a couple of bad outings and it probably won’t make a huge difference, but in a sport where two games account for 17 percent of your entire season, a couple of bad games in a college football season can mean the difference between a successful season (however you define it) and an unsuccessful one.
Vanderbilt will have an uphill fight to build on 2016
