Vanderbilt Athletics, despite losing time in the woods, is trending upwards.
The football team has a new coach who has landed a top 40 recruitment class to increase his reconstruction efforts. The men’s basketball team has recorded its first winning season since 2017 and is currently in the NIT quarterfinals. The women’s basketball team has two wins in its WNIT campaign after missing the postseason all of the last seven years. The baseball program remains strong as hell.
The university’s branding, however, is in the middle of a massive step backwards. The Commodores announced on Tuesday that they were replacing their iconic “Star V” logo to remove something from the NFT announcement of a fake company:
In case you don’t want to sit through these two-minute history lessons about a school you usually know to come to Georgia every fall with boat races, Vanderbilt does this:
for this:
The new vision, and I can not say it clearly enough, sighs.
Vanderbilt University gave a small but passionate fanbase a change they did not ask for. She eliminates a recognizable icon of her faith with a generic, video game create-a-team, Microsoft Word-looking logo that is the opposite of special. It’s red. It’s a cliché. It is the Villanova logo in a different gradient.
In an effort to signal a new future, the university has rejected a key element of school identity. Star V was a symbol of hope for a fan base that really went through the wrestler just to pay for his faith through eventual breakthroughs – bowling games, sweet sixteen trips, national championships in women’s tennis, baseball and, most famously, bowling. That wants to throw away the new logo. Vanderbilt: We are like everyone else!
But Vanderbilt * is not * like * everyone else. Being a Vanderbilt fan is rooting for the Cubs through a World Series drought or investing your trust in the Maple Leafs even if you know, deep down, there’s a 99 percent chance this will all end in heartache. The university is throwing these emotional investments into a hollow rebrand as if no one remembers the 2-10 football seasons or the Bryce Drew basketball era or Woody Widenhofer, the head coach-Tollbooth operator says his teams “had fun, she expects to win.
That’s not how it works! A new logo does not fix this! But the university, realizing they could not erase this story, instead erased the seal from its believers, adding yet another self-inflicted wound to an already-led fandom.
Commodore fans did not need this. We bought into the Vandy United facility upgrades – a $ 300 million investment in athletics that means typing so much more than “V” into a WordArt app and calling it a day. We were happy with the current situation and optimistic about the future.
But the new logo is a reminder that, yes, we’ll probably clean it all up. The message inside is not “it’s a whole new era for the university”, it is “we have no interest in being special and would rather just adapt.” That was never Vandy’s mark and, for better or (mostly) worse, that is the identity that fans and alumni were proud to pass on.
We had Star V because it was recognizable. We belonged to losers because we knew how sweet it would be when victory finally came. Vanderbilt Athletics was never about bandwagons or new beginnings, it was about crawling through miles and miles of dirt in hopes of getting out clean on the other side. These losses made the triumphs, however fleeting, special.
There is nothing special about this new logo. There is no damn thing “Vanderbilt” about it.
Bring Star V back.
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