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This is an opinion column.

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The transformation currently taking place at Vanderbilt traces its Southern football roots all the way back to 1899.

Back then, Vanderbilt’s biggest rival was Sewanee, and Sewanee had a wildly ambitious, and halfway crazy football manager named Luke Lea. It’s all but lost to time now, but Sewanee’s Luke Lea was the real godfather of the Southeastern Conference. When it came to Southern football, the man was either a genius or a lunatic.

Sound vaguely familiar?

All these years later, Luke Lea has a godson in Tennessee football who’s a hell-raising revolutionary, too.

Unearthed for the first time with this column, Clark Lea, the head coach at Vanderbilt, is a descendant of Sewanee’s Luke Lea, the mastermind behind Sewanee’s legendary 12-0 season in 1899. I had my suspicions about the Leas after researching the 1899 Sewanee football team, and then Clark Lea confirmed the family connection for me during a brief conversation at SEC Media Days in 2023.

Vanderbilt plays at Auburn on Saturday and, thanks to the latest Lea of Southern college football, it’s going to feel like old times in the SEC for the 11:45 a.m. kickoff. Vanderbilt is back and once again good at football. It’s been awhile.

With a win against the Tigers, the Commodores will sweep the state of Alabama in football for the first time since 1955. Despite its victory against Alabama earlier this season, Vanderbilt is a 6.5-point underdog for the game.

When I wrote earlier this season that Vanderbilt might be back, I got plenty of reactions from people wondering when Vandy was ever any good. There was a time when Vanderbilt was the best football team in the Deep South, and part of the reason for Vandy’s rise was its escalating arms race with rival Sewanee.

The renaissance of Clark Lea’s Vanderbilt has some groundbreaking similarities to the architecture that built Luke Lea’s tough-as-train rails Sewanee football team of 1899. Clark Lea is using the combination of NIL and the transfer portal to reshape how we view Vanderbilt football and the new reality of Southeastern Conference football. His Southern football forebear, Luke Lea, used every device available to him at the time to build one of the South’s first legendary college football teams.

GOODMAN: Nick Saban isn’t walking through that Commodore

Clark Lea represents the future of football in the SEC. Luke Lea was at the forefront of modern-day college football way back in 1899. Back in the turn of the 20th century, college football was more like a club sport. It was plenty competitive, though, and the passion of the game was there from the beginning.

Then Luke Lea came along and changed the game.

Managers back then were more like present-day athletics directors. Luke Lea did everything behind the scenes for Sewanee football, including making the schedule, raising money, recruiting players, organizing travel and writing stories for the student newspaper.

Going into the 1899 season, Luke Lea foresaw before anyone the trajectory of Southern college football. Even back then, it was all about the money. Getting ahead of the competition, Lea filled out an unprecedented schedule for Sewanee. It included 12 games — unheard of back in those days, but now the standard — but there was something truly insane about the fall lineup. It featured a 10-day train trip of 2,500 miles throughout the South in which Sewanee would play five road games across six days.

They filled up barrels of mountain spring water for the trip and Luke Lea hired physical therapy trainers for the voyage. The 18 players who made the trek across the South had games during the day and slept on the train at night. And here’s the legendary part about all that. Not only did Sewanee win all those games, but the Cumberland Plateau’s Tigers shut out every opponent.

Almost impossible to believe but true, Sewanee throttled Texas, Texas A&M, Tulane, LSU and Ole Miss by a combined score of 91-0.

And it all happened over the course of six grueling days.

Sewanee’s Luke Lea had some earth-tilting ideas when it came to college football. Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea once stood at the dais at SEC Media Days and announced to the world that Vanderbilt was going to be the best football program in the country.

After everything we’ve seen this season, I’m kinda starting to believe him.

Vanderbilt (5-3, 2-2 SEC) began the season with a 34-27 overtime upset of Virginia Tech. Then came the monumental destruction of everything we thought we knew about the SEC. Vanderbilt 40, Alabama 35 is the kind of final score that can have ramifications across the league to a long time.

In this new age of college football, can Clark Lea rebuild Vanderbilt into an SEC powerhouse? Doubt him at your own risk. Vanderbilt nearly pulled an upset last week against No. 5 Texas, losing to the well-heeled Longhorns 27-24. For the record, Vanderbilt’s all-time record against Texas now stands at 8-4-1.

Vandy’s all-time record against Auburn? People born after 1950 might be surprised. Auburn didn’t take the lead in the series until last year. The Tigers are 22-21-1 against Vanderbilt going into Saturday’s game.

For his part, Auburn coach Hugh Freeze doesn’t view Vanderbilt’s success as a fluke. Freeze praised Clark Lea earlier this week for being one of the best coaches in the country. Freeze, of course, knows a little bit more about Vandy’s new offense than most. It’s pretty much the exact same system that New Mexico State ran against Auburn last season.

Even the fearless quarterback, Diego Pavia, is the same.

In a move that would have made ol’ Luke Lea proud, Clark Lea has used the rules of a changing game to reimagine his football team. Over the offseason, Lea had the wild idea of bringing the core of that New Mexico State team to Nashville. Even former New Mexico State coach Jerry Kill is along for the ride.

“They’re good at who they are,” Freeze said, “and they’re good at being who they are.”

It all starts with Pavia, the dual-threat quarterback who probably would have fit in pretty well with that Iron Man football Sewanee team of 1899. Sewanee’s sweeping run through Southern football needed a train. Presumably, Pavia and his New Mexico State compatriots traveled to Tennessee by plane.

Poetically, the only team to score against that Sewanee team in 1899 was John Heisman’s Auburn Tigers. In a game that turned violent and eventually had to be canceled due to darkness, Sewanee defeated Auburn 11-10 at Riverside Park in Montgomery on Nov. 30, 1899.

It would be unwise to disregard Vanderbilt as a one-year wonder. Behind the scenes, Clark Lea and athletics director Candice Lee are already building for the future through the school’s NIL collective, Anchor Impact.

Pretty much everyone in the SEC these days has a soft spot for Vanderbilt, but the ghosts of Sewanee will hate that Vanderbilt is once again a budding football power. After all, it was a gate-receipt disagreement from the 1898 season between Luke Lea of Sewanee and the boys of Vanderbilt that apparently gave Lea the motivation to play 12 games in 1899.

After college, Luke Lea went on to become an attorney and U.S. Senator. And all those articles he wrote for the Sewanee newspaper came in handy, too.

Luke Lea was also the longtime publisher of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.

I’m willing to bet that Luke Lea would be pulling for this new-age Vandy revolution, albeit begrudgingly. Football rivalries in the South run deep, but family is family.

MAILBAG

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Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of the book “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s Ultimate Team.”