Tennessean: David Williams working on preliminary plans to replace Vanderbilt Stadium

Vanderbilt Stadium is the least impressive home field in the SEC. Athletic Director David Williams knows that, and he aims to make a change.

Williams sat down with the Tennessean’s Adam Sparks for an exclusive interview where he made his plans to replace Vanderbilt Stadium public for the first time. The longtime administrator and vice chancellor is currently weighing his options between an on-campus and off-campus venue, but hopes to have the project underway in “the next three to four years.”

Even before I took over (as AD in 2003), people were saying, ‘Stadium, stadium, stadium’ because everybody was building stadiums. But there hadn’t been serious talk internally about it before this. When you look at SEC stadiums, we are not in the same ballpark as the rest of them. That’s not a secret.

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So the (football) stadium is the next project, and it’s time to look at it in a real way. We will have to go a long way with it because we are talking about a price tag we’ve never dealt with before.

Vanderbilt currently has the lowest football seating capacity of any member of the SEC. With room for just 40,350 fans, the Commodores can hold nearly 24,000 fewer fans than the conference’s next-smallest venue, Ole Miss’s Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Williams told the Tennessean he hopes Vandy’s future home field will be “better but not necessarily bigger.”

You can read all of Williams’s thought about replacing the concrete husk of sadness that is Vanderbilt Stadium over at the Tennessean. As usual, Adam Sparks kills it, and the Goldfather gives us some frank insights into his vision of the Commodores’ future.