Clark Lea jokes about eating 30 boxes of Cheez-Its to celebrate Week 1 win

This week Clark Lea welcomed a new, fun problem: What to do with all those Cheez-Its?

With Vanderbilt being named the Cheez-It national team of the week by the Football Writers Association of America, Lea was gifted a plethora of the cheesy crackers. Too many for him to readily know what to do with them, for that matter.

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“Well I’ve got about 30 boxes of Cheez-Its out there in the lobby so I’ve gotta figure out how I’m going to eat all of them,” Lea said at his weekly press conference, to laughs from the room.

But the honor of being the national team of the week, and the spotlight being on Vanderbilt after an overtime win, is something Lea wants his team to savor — and begin to expect more and more.

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And that, Lea explained at length, can be the real benefit of this week. Though, the Cheez-Its are probably a nice perk.

“Listen, I celebrate any shine that is out there for us,” Lea said. “These kids work so hard to have success and I want them to feel the feeling of being celebrated for that success. They know, and I was very clear to them this morning and will continue to be clear to them that everything that we want is out in front of us. Not a one of them signed up for one win. This is a journey. We’ve been very deliberate about talking about it that way and said this after the game, we were one or two plays from having a really disappointing start, at which point we’re having totally different conversations right now. So, some of that is just the nature of the world and it can be fickle at times.

“But we’re going to appreciate, enjoy being on the right side of that right now and yet internally we have our focus on continuing our climb. But these guys deserve the attention and I want them to have the attention. And what I want is to have a program that is so successful that this becomes our normal. And what a better time to start to understand what it means to have more attention on you and being able to stay disciplined and have boundaries in your preparation, this is a great time to do that, so we’re going to do it.”

From Cheez-Its to Raising Cane’s, Vanderbilt’s been about the food this week

Vanderbilt football picked up a surprise season-opening win at home at Virginia Tech to open the season. And leading the way was transfer quarterback Diego Pavia, both through the air and, often, on the ground.

The Commodores offensive machine looked well-oiled on Saturday in the win, with Pavia working seamless alongside running back Sedrick Alexander and behind the offensive line. And when asked about the early success this week, Pavia shared the secret sauce to how Vanderbilt build such chemistry on the offense: Raising Cane’s.

“We’re big Cane’s guys. We go to Cane’s,” Pavia said of him and Alexander. “Me, him, Gunnar [Hansen], Duncan [MacDonald], a lot of O linemen. We all go to Cane’s. We love Cane’s. A lot of people would die over Cane’s on this team.”

For Pavia, a New Mexico native who transferred to Nashville from out west, the exposure to Canes has been relatively a new thing, although he did note his native Albuquerque did get one in the last year or so.

Pressed further for the root of their love of Cane’s, Pavia shared that he and his teammates are not too dissimilar from the rest of us.

“The sauce. BOBS toast,” Pavia said, alluding to Cane’s highly-popular dipping sauce and the side of bread — with BOBS standing for butter on both sides.

“I might come back around 225,” he said.