Here’s a sure sign that the day Vanderbilt toppled both Alabama and the goalpost was historic: Memorabilia from the upset is going up for auction.
On Saturday, Vanderbilt beat a No. 1 ranked football team for the first time in school history while also snapping a four-decade dry spell against the SEC’s most famed program. Two days after the Commodores shocked the nation with the 40-35 win over the then-No. 1 Crimson Tide, the university is auctioning off items from the game.
Two items were already sold out as of press time; eight-inch pieces of the crossbar sold for $4,035 each while four-inch pieces of the upright sold for $1,005 each. Also on the auction are several items that would be signed and personalized by Coach Clark Lea: As of this writing, four game pylons currently range from $1200 to $1,400 bids; four game balls are drawing between $4,085 and $4,285; and a game helmet has spiked to a current bid of over $30K.
Vanderbilt’s senior associate athletic director Mark Carter said in an interview that like many of their SEC rivals, the school frequently auctions off items from their sports teams—but nothing to the level of the items from Saturday’s game. “We’ve got auctions going on year-round,” said Carter in a phone interview. “It’s just most of them don’t have as much promotion and an excitement around them, especially from a national eyeball standpoint, as this game did. We do it routinely, but this just offered opportunity to go a little further than we normally do.”
Of course, there was the matter of retrieving the goal post from the Cumberland after its two-mile sojourn through downtown Nashville. “Being here in Nashville, you’re naturally, or hopefully, going to have a great relationship with our metro partners here,” Carter said. “So the fire department fished it out of the river not too long after it was dumped in there. It was then returned back here to campus, and we’ve got it in our facility shop now.”
Carter couldn’t give an exact number of how many pieces were cut out of the goal post, but estimated that there are “a couple hundred,” including the elbows and round connectors.
By late Monday afternoon, Carter said that over $200,000 was raised in the auction, with the proceeds going to Anchor Impact, a NIL collective that is unaffiliated with the private university.
On Sunday, the SEC levied a $100,000 fine to the school after a group of fans ripped down the goalpost following the final whistle, marched two miles through downtown Nashville and dumped it into the Cumberland River. Though sports fans and on-campus students love the rowdy energy of field storming, the fines are applied out of concerns for the safety of players, coaches and other in-game personnel.
The fine itself will go to Alabama, though it’s not exactly medicine for the Tide’s pain. Alabama fell to seventh in the latest AP poll while Vandy received 23 votes in the same ranking.
Prior to Saturday’s upset, Vanderbilt football was 0-60 against AP top-five teams, the longest such streak in the poll era going back to 1936. The Commodores also hadn’t beaten ‘Bama since 1984; Saturday’s win broke a 23-game losing streak.
(This story has been updated after speaking with Vanderbilt senior associate AD Mark Carter.)
