Sitting at 7-1 and right in the thick of the College Football Playoff race, No. 9 Vanderbilt is enjoying a dream season.
Traditionally one of the SEC's basement dwellers, the Commodores enjoyed a spurt of success under head coach James Franklin in the early 2010s -- posting back-to-back nine-win seasons -- but haven't climbed to their current heights in a long time. If Vanderbilt can win just three more games this fall, it will have tallied the program's first double-digit-win season.
Needless to say, it has been a while since the Commodores had a team this good. In fact, prior to this year, the last time Vanderbilt was ranked in the top 10 of the AP poll was 1947.
The Commodores' 1947 squad eventually faltered a bit -- a 3-3 final mark in SEC play meant they finished the season unranked after a 3-0 start to the campaign helped them shoot up the polls. But with Diego Pavia at quarterback and head coach Clark Lea on the headset, this time around Vanderbilt's top-10 ranking feels like it could be built to last until the year's end.
With the Commodores looking to continue their run against No. 20 Texas in Austin on Saturday, we took a look back at what things were like in Nashville the last time Vanderbilt had a top-10 squad.
Hall of Fame head coach Red Sanders leads the Commodores
Vanderbilt's 1947 squad getting off to an impressive start isn't much of a surprise -- it had one of the best coaches of that era of college football on its sideline. Red Sanders took over his alma mater in 1940, but didn't truly find his stride until his second stint as head coach following a World War II service-induced break.
Interestingly, while 1947 marked the Commodores' peak ranking under Sanders, the program's best season overall came a year later in 1948, when Vanderbilt went 8-2-1 and finished at No. 12 in the AP Poll -- the school's first postseason AP Poll ranking, and its last until 2012.
Sanders eventually headed west to take over at UCLA, where he'd amass 66 wins across nine seasons. He helped the Bruins to a 9-0 record in 1954 and a share of that season's national title, which to this day stands as the program's only national championship.
Sanders was inducted into the National College Football Hall of Fame in 1996.
Offensive output varied quite a bit
If you went to watch Vanderbilt play in 1947, there was a considerable amount of variance in the amount of scoring you might see in a given game.
The team's season-opening win against Northwestern wasn't much of a shootout, as the Commodores won 3-0. The defensive-oriented trend continued for the next several contests -- Vanderbilt entered the month of November with a 3-2 record... and just 41 total points scored on the season!
The Commodores would then average 43 points over their next three contests (they demolished lower-division Tennessee Tech 68-0 in that stretch) before posting 13 points across their final two games.
A much-changed -- yet still the same -- stadium
There's no shortage of changes from 1947 Vanderbilt and college football to 2025. One constant? The school's stadium... sort of.
Now called FirstBank Stadium, the venue (somewhat infamously) has undergone plenty of construction and renovations over the years. In fact, the mere name of the facility has changed multiple times. Before FirstBank took over the naming rights it was Vanderbilt Stadium from 1981 to 2022, and Dudley Field before that. But, as far as location is concerned, the Dudley Field that Sanders' Commodores played on in 1947 is the same home ground that Clark Lea and Diego Pavia are now defending.
Filling out the rest of the poll: Michigan, Texas... Yale?
Accompanying Vanderbilt in the Oct. 13, 1947 AP Poll were a number of likely suspects, as well as some programs that might look a bit out of place in the modern age.
The poll's top three checks out easily enough: Michigan, Notre Dame and Texas all rank in the sport's top-five winningest programs. Things then get a little more unusual -- California, Georgia Tech and Illinois aren't exactly blue bloods -- but still plenty conventional. At No. 7 is Army, which is hard to fathom in 2025 for sure, but hey, the Black Knights rose into the top 25 last season under Jeff Monken.
And then, at No. 8, there's Penn. Not Penn State (which checked in at No. 9), but the University of Pennsylvania. Penn was one of two now-FCS Ivy League schools to crack that week's poll, with Yale placing twelfth.
A far smaller city and school
Vanderbilt football's rise has coincided with a similar rise by the city of Nashville in national population rankings. It's one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States in recent years and currently slots into the top 25.
That wasn't the case in the Sanders era of Commodore football. Nashville's population was just 261,000 in 1950 -- a little more than a third of the population of nearly 690,000 recorded during the most recent census.
Vanderbilt University has grown considerably as well -- student enrollment was just 3,529 in 1950, compared to the 13,575 total students enrolled last school year.