I’m not going to sit here and try and convince you that Vanderbilt was some secretly awesome team. No one is thinking that. And if you are...stop that.
What I will say is that even elite college football teams struggle in certain situations.
Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Clemson, USC, Florida State, Texas, Oklahoma...name a blue blood from any prior season and they’ve been tested in some way in a single game or even multiple games. That’s the beauty of college sports and football specifically: you never know when a team is going to show up and proverbially forget to put their pants on.