Don’t laugh, Vanderbilt is thinking bowl game in 2016

12:25 PM ET

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Derek Mason sits in his McGugin Center office, a giant black-and-gold splashed mural of downtown Nashville and the Vanderbilt campus on the wall behind him.

At the top of the mural, there is one word: Limitless.

It’s precisely the way Mason feels about the potential of his football program as he enters his third season as head coach. And not that he really cares what anybody else thinks, but he understands that part of coaching at Vanderbilt is hearing the litany of reasons why the Commodores can’t win in the SEC.

He hears every bit of it, or has heard every bit of it, but that doesn’t mean he listens to any of it.

Keep in mind Mason coached at Stanford — another academically elite institution known more for its SAT scores than football scores — before arriving at Vanderbilt, and the Cardinal suffered through seven straight losing seasons last decade. But then came Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw, followed by the kind of run that would be embraced at even the most unabashed football factories. In Mason’s four seasons at Stanford, the Cardinal never won fewer than 11 games and made back-to-back Rose Bowl trips, winning the school’s first Rose Bowl championship in 41 years to cap the 2012 season.

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So he knows what the blueprint looks like and is confident he can implement it. But even more importantly, he thinks he finally has the experience, depth and physicality to compete in the SEC.

“They can talk about all these other conferences, but this conference is the toughest in college football,” Mason said. “Having seen most of these other conferences and knowing what you have to prepare for week in and week out, it’s a King Kong conference, a big-dog conference. There’s no way around having depth. There’s no way around making your guys grow up in this conference and play football, and that’s what we’ve worked hard to do over the last 24 months.”

Mason, 46, walked right into the middle of an ugly rape case involving four former Vanderbilt players when he took the job in 2014, and that cloud hovered. His predecessor, James Franklin, won nine games each of his last two years, which had never been done at Vanderbilt, but there was also heavy attrition (and several misses) in two of Franklin’s three signing classes, meaning Mason had no choice but to play a heavy dose of freshmen in his first two seasons.

“We’ve done a good job every year of trying to move this program forward,” said Mason, who took over the defense last year and saw the Commodores go from 106th nationally in scoring defense (33.3 points per game) to 22nd (21 points per game). “It’s no secret of where this program started once I took over. I think what we’ve been able to do, slowly but surely, is minimize the outside distractions so we can start to maximize the on-field …

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