Vanderbilt athletics, despite some time lost in the woods, are trending upwards.
The football team has a new head coach who landed a top 40 recruiting class to buoy his rebuilding efforts. The men’s basketball team recorded its first winning season since 2017 and is currently in the NIT quarterfinals. The women’s basketball team is two wins into its WNIT campaign after missing the postseason each of the last seven years. The baseball program remains stout as hell.
The university’s branding, however, is in the midst of a massive step backward. The Commodores announced Tuesday they’ll be replacing their iconic “Star V” logo in favor of something ripped from a failing company’s NFT announcement:
We’ve launched a refreshed visual identity designed to reflect our forward momentum and to build pride and visibility across the institution and athletics program.
Learn more: https://t.co/JGwN7cdVt3 pic.twitter.com/buMvMYcB78
— Vanderbilt Athletics (@vucommodores) March 22, 2022
In case you didn’t want to sit through that two minute history lesson about a school you mostly know for getting boat-raced by Georgia each fall, Vanderbilt is trading this:
for this:
That new vision, and I cannot state this plainly enough, sucks.
Vanderbilt University gave a small but passionate fanbase a change they did not ask for. They eliminated an recognizable icon of their faith with a generic, video game create-a-team, Microsoft Word-looking logo that is the opposite of special. It’s rote. It’s cliche. It’s the Villanova logo in a different gradient.
In an effort to signal a new future the university discarded a key element of the school’s identity. The Star V was a symbol of hope for a fanbase that had truly gone through the ringer only to have its faith paid off by eventual breakthroughs — bowl games, Sweet Sixteen trips, national championships in women’s tennis, baseball and, most famously, bowling. The new logo wants to throw that away. Vanderbilt: We’re just like everyone else!
Vanderbilt released images of what the new football helmets and baseball caps will look like: pic.twitter.com/YXfYIbWlaj
— Robbie Weinstein (@rwweinstein) March 22, 2022
But Vanderbilt *isn’t* like everyone else. Being a Vanderbilt fan is rooting for the Cubs through a World Series drought or investing your faith in the Maple Leafs even though you know, deep down, there’s a 99 percent chance this will all end in heartache. The university is cashing out those emotional investments in a hollow rebrand as if no one’s going to remember those 2-10 football seasons or the Bryce Drew basketball era or Woody Widenhofer, the head-coach-turned-tollbooth-operator telling his teams “have fun, expect to win.”
That’s not how this works! A new logo doesn’t fix that! But the university, realizing they can’t wipe that history, instead wiped the sigil of its faithful instead, adding yet another self-inflicted wound to an already-fraught fandom.
Commodore fans didn’t need this. We’d bought in to the Vandy United facility upgrades — a $300 million investment in athletics that means so much more than typing “V” into a WordArt app and calling it a day. We were happy with the current state of affairs and optimistic about the future.
But the new logo is a reminder that, yes, we’re probably going to botch all this. The message within isn’t “it’s a brand new era for the university,” it’s “we have no interest in being special and would prefer just to fit in.” That’s never been Vandy’s brand and, for better or (mostly) worse, that’s the identity fans and alumni have been proud to carry forward.
We wore the Star V because it was recognizable. We owned up to losses because we knew how sweet it would be when the wins eventually came. Vanderbilt athletics were never about bandwagons or new beginnings, it was about crawling through miles and miles of garbage in hopes of coming out clean on the other side. Those losses made the triumphs, however fleeting, seem special.
There’s nothing special about this new logo. There’s not a damn thing “Vanderbilt” about it.
Bring back the Star V.
