A Vanderbilt collective? Inside the school’s aggressive turn and the man driven to make it work

As the early signing period approached, the folks in the Vanderbilt football building discussed Ka’Morreun Pimpton as a progress report of sorts.

Clark Lea and his staff were on the 6-foot-6, 220-pound tight end from Brewer, Texas, before the staffs they try to compete with each Saturday in the SEC, and this is how it must be. This is the edge GM Barton Simmons is asked to provide. They saw burgeoning, high-level talent and strong academics. They built a relationship and sold a vision. They sensed a great fit. They got a June commitment from Pimpton, over offers from Rice and Colorado State. They watched him validate their evaluation with a monster senior season. They watched Texas, LSU and many others come after him.

As of hours before Pimpton ultimately signed Wednesday with LSU, they were still hopeful. Losing him doesn’t ruin this third Lea class and signing him wouldn’t have made it. It was a test of their process and whether the progress seen in a 5-7 season might be enough to ward off the most advantaged of programs. It was not, and there are several reasons a recruit might pick an LSU or a Texas over Vanderbilt.

If the process develops as planned, money will not be one of them in the future.

Great time chatting with the #TDR guys. Check out the full episode here ⤵️ https://t.co/qJh2RPx289

— Anchor Collective (@AnchorCollecti) December 16, 2022

Lea and the Commodores signed 21 recruits Wednesday, a class ranked No. 50 in the nation and No. 14 in the SEC in the 247Sports Composite. If their evaluations are as strong as they believe, some of the programs ranked ahead of them will be coming for some of those players in the future. That’s college football today.

“We are going to get better players every year,” Simmons said. “Right now we’ve got some really good players that teams have tried to poach, so yeah, the sharks are in the water and that’s not going to change.”

Some important signings from earlier this month speak to what has changed. Vanderbilt freshman quarterback AJ Swann signed a deal with the Anchor Collective on Dec. 13. So did Vanderbilt junior receiver Will Sheppard. So did Vanderbilt sophomore linebacker C.J. Taylor. These are three of most poach-able players on the Vanderbilt roster, essentially declaring they are getting paid and aren’t looking around.

That’s not to say they would have been without these signed agreements to earn money off their names, images and likenesses. But the announcements read like a collective attempt at shark deterrent.

“It’s a big deal,” 247Sports national director of recruiting Steve Wiltfong said of the Anchor Collective. “Every school has to have some NIL these days to have any chance. Young men will often pick Vanderbilt for reasons beyond that, but if you get a great player and the vultures are coming after them behind the scenes, that collective money can go a long way.”

Name, image, likeness translates to recruiting, retention, portal. The term “NIL collective” has existed for less than two years yet feels as fundamental to college football as “Whoa Nellie.” Vanderbilt rather quietly confirmed its embrace of the strategy in the Anchor Collective’s Nov. 22 press release announcing its existence, with AD Candice Lee saying it “represents another resource at our student-athletes’ disposal, which is important as the landscape of college athletics continues to evolve.”

Vanderbilt fans concerned their school was going to stay on the sidelines rather than participate in said evolution had their answer. And it wasn’t produced hastily. This direction has been the conviction of Lea, Lee and Vanderbilt chancellor Daniel Diermeier for more than a year. The challenge was finding someone capable of constructing something more sustainable than a booster Go Fund Me.

‘I always felt schools should do more’

Before his 2021 debut season with the Commodores, Lea saw it coming with collectives. By the time Earl Bennett, Vanderbilt football’s director of player development, convened a call of several prominent football alums in January to gauge interest, some collectives — such as Spyre Sports, which supports University of Tennessee athletes — were already going full blast.

“The reality quickly sunk in that this is part of the experience now, this is no longer something that’s the exception,” Lea said. “This is the way of life. This is still about building a great team with a great culture and environment. I still believe there are some aspects of team building that you can’t make transactional. But we have the ability to enhance the lives of our student-athletes and give them a place where there are truly no compromises. That doesn’t mean we’re trying to set records here, but we’re going to take a holistic approach just like we do with everything.”

Jason Burns was on that video conference with Bennett and about 10 other former Vanderbilt players from various eras. Bennett, a former Vandy and NFL star receiver who recently earned his doctoral degree in higher education leadership, explained collectives and how Vanderbilt would need one to compete moving forward. He asked if anyone on the call would consider spearheading the effort.

“Literally no one raised their hand,” Burns said. “Including me.”

And that’s not because Burns didn’t want to help Lea and Bennett. Both were huge parts of his Vanderbilt experience.

That journey began with Burns breaking down and crying in his parents’ living room in New Orleans on signing day in 2002. He had just watched several of his teammates at prestigious St. Augustine High sign with Power 5 schools, none of which offered him. He quarterbacked the team as a junior and senior, served as class president and won the Purple Knight award as the top student-athlete. He believed he was good enough to play in the SEC. He enrolled at Vanderbilt and walked on.

Burns’ locker was right next to Lea’s in that freshman season, in the part of the locker room known as “walk-on alley.” Lea was a junior who had just earned a scholarship from coach Bobby Johnson for his work as a fullback and core special teams player.

“I knew he was gonna do something great in whatever he did,” Burns said of Lea. “One of those guys with natural leadership abilities.”

Burns eventually found a role, too, as a 6-foot, 180-pound receiver who did a lot of his work in the kicking game. He aspired to earn a scholarship later in his career. In the meantime, he started preparing for a career in business. Burns’ parents owned successful courier and payroll businesses in New Orleans and Burns’ father, Ronnie, was the second Black president of the Sugar Bowl Committee.

Ronnie Burns and the late Monroe Carell Jr. were business partners at the time, and Jason Burns got an internship with Carell’s Central Parking Corp. Carrell became a mentor to him, and Burns got the business bug watching Carell negotiate a parking deal with Pat Bowlen, owner of the Denver Broncos. Burns eventually got a full-time job with Central in Philadelphia and was the youngest person selected for the company’s executive training program.

“That was my NIL,” Burns said, an important point because he said he wants the Anchor Collective to be more than a short-term financial boost to Vanderbilt athletes.

His older brother, Vinnie, punted at Virginia Tech, so he got a firsthand look at big-time college football and how life unfolds for some afterward.

“I remember feeling that a lot of these universities take advantage of these kids and that so many of them don’t have a lot to show for it when they’re done playing,” Burns said. “Look, some of that is on them for what I call ‘hoop dreaming’ and not being realistic about who they are and what their career path may be. But I always felt schools should do more. My internship with Carell totally opened my eyes up to a new world.”

Two big things happened to Burns in his final offseason as a Vanderbilt football player. One, Johnson told him he was getting a scholarship for his senior season because of his leadership and hard work. He called his parents. He called his grandfather, who was one of the first Black men to serve in the Marine Corps and won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He called everyone close to him to share in the joy.

Two, Bennett arrived on campus as part of the incoming freshman class. It took one informal workout of watching Bennett torch Vanderbilt defensive backs for Burns to realize his hopes of having a consistent role in the offense were fading. He weakened those hopes by mentoring Bennett, in the process starting a lifelong friendship. Just before the season started, Johnson called Burns into his office.

“He said, ‘Look, I apologize but the numbers didn’t work out,’” Burns said of a scholarship offer rescinded. “I went down to the practice field and I was in the same position, bent over crying, just like I was three years before that in my parents’ living room. There are some moments in your life that you’ll always remember, and that was one of those for me.”

Burns got a chunk of Neyland Stadium grass a few months later, though, after Jay Cutler hit Bennett for the winning touchdown in Vanderbilt’s first win over Tennessee in 23 years. Burns ran parking operations for Carell at Lincoln Financial Field, home of the Philadelphia Eagles, for a few years before coming home to take a role in the family business.

He helped modernize the courier business, QCS Logistics, and stabilize it as president in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It flourished and the family sold it in 2020 to Austin, Texas-based Dropoff, Inc. Burns lives there with his family and serves as corporate development director. He is also the first Black president of the Customized Logistics & Delivery Association. He’s a leader in his industry.

Yet there he was in March, sitting in Lea’s office, talking about taking a central role in Vanderbilt athletics.

‘I don’t see why Vanderbilt can’t be Notre Dame‘

Tim Corbin likes Jason Burns. Corbin likes the Burns family. He has known them since he was an assistant baseball coach at Clemson and Ronnie’s younger brother Burton Burns — who later gained fame as Alabama running backs coach for Heisman winners Mark Ingram and Derrick Henry — was a football assistant.

He likes the big-picture mission of the Anchor Collective, too, and that has helped him come around on his university’s embrace of the strategy. But on NIL in general, Vanderbilt’s two-time national champion baseball coach said he is “still not 100 percent for it” and that “paying athletes from different streams is still something I have a hard time with.”

“Not because I don’t want to do anything for athletes,” he said. “It’s that I really don’t want to put more on their plate. More on their plate while taking away responsibilities to themselves academically and to their team.”

This is a common refrain from college coaches, though many won’t go there on the record. They deal with team dynamics on a daily basis. The virtuous among them take seriously the charge of preparing young athletes for life. The money they make and freedom they have to operate in an open market opens any NIL resistance to criticism.

Corbin brings decades of credibility to the discussion. And it’s not like his program can’t use some NIL help. Contrary to popular message-board complaints, Vanderbilt’s roster in the 2021-22 season paid an average of $17,500 of tuition per player. Corbin has been able to fill in some gaps with the university’s need-based aid program. But this is still a sport with 11.7 scholarships, and plenty of Vanderbilt players don’t qualify for need-based aid.

“Selfishly, in baseball where we aren’t a full scholarship sport, any time we can help (athletes) financially to decrease the cost of school, certainly I’m for that,” Corbin said. “Now it’s become legalized, what maybe a lot of schools did prior to it being legalized. It’s probably something that was needed. But if we’re going to be in this world, we have to find ways to do it in a Vanderbilt way.”

That’s what Lea and Burns talked about in Lea’s office in March. Burns brought his 8-year-old twins, Jason Jr. (JJ) and Jordyn (Jo Jo), to his old school and they were able to catch a baseball game, a women’s basketball game in the WNIT and some spring football practice.

The thought of spearheading a collective had weighed on Burns’ mind. He almost left the business world for sports soon after college, applying for director of football operations at the University of Pennsylvania, but then he found out they paid $7.15 an hour plus sandwiches instead of per diem on road trips.

As he and Lea reconnected, Lea described his vision for the future of Vanderbilt football. Burns detailed his journey in business. He looked at Lea’s bookshelf and noticed a book called “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Gino Wickman. That’s a book, he told Lea, that helped him stabilize QCS Logistics after they lost a client that made up 40 percent of their business.

“It was just a great conversation, and Clark never asked me to do anything at all,” Burns said. “That was never part of the conversation. But flying back from Nashville to Austin, man, it was all on my mind and on my heart. What Clark’s trying to do with the football program. Candice, a former student-athlete, a brilliant African-American woman doing great things for the university. A chancellor who wants to fully sport athletics in a way Vandy has never really done. I just started talking to them more, started doing homework on collectives, started formulating a plan.”

Eight months later, a brief press release hit the internet. The Anchor Collective offers five tiers of subscription plans, and subscribers will have access to the Vanderbilt athletes they support in various ways. It used to be that a booster might have a star athlete over to the house to meet the kids, as part of an unspoken arrangement, and now it’s simply formalized and payable by credit card.

Burns also is prioritizing corporate partnerships. He wants to help Vanderbilt athletes. He also wants to build a sturdy company. He hired Michael Lumpkin as business development director of Anchor Collective, its lone full-time employee, and Victoria Rico as executive administrator. Lumpkin played college football at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., worked in a sports agency out of college and got a master’s degree at Vanderbilt in organizational leadership.

His days have been filled talking with Vanderbilt compliance folks. And coaches. And athletes. And representatives of other collectives. And employees of Learfield Sports, which has contracted with the Anchor Collective to help tell the stories of the athletes who can help Vanderbilt win and help the Anchor Collective exist.

“With our current state of business I will say we’re light on resources but we’re trying to make everything go as far as possible,” Lumpkin said. “We are making progress.”

Vanderbilt is a small private school in a league with massive public schools with much larger alumni bases that pour money into winning at sports. Especially football. It’s a smaller alumni base, but a successful one.

Burns’ passion — and Corbin’s passion, and Lea’s passion, and Lee’s passion — is to sustain a business that helps sustain livelihoods after athletics.

“People think about NIL and they think about money, money, money,” Burns said. “It should be a lot bigger than that. It is bigger than that.”

But money, and more money, and more money, will be required.

“If Vanderbilt doesn’t get behind something like this, the reality is, if people are concerned about our program — I’m talking from the football standpoint, because we know baseball is great, but even baseball is subject to this — then things will get worse,” Burns said. “I don’t see why Vanderbilt can’t be Notre Dame. It should be, in my mind. Why sacrifice one for the other? We should not have to. We should have the best of everything, because that’s the type of individuals Vanderbilt produces. But that’s the fundamental question for Vanderbilt. Does Vanderbilt want to compete?”

This has been a fair question for Vanderbilt administrators for decades. The Anchor Collective is the latest answer in the affirmative. Recent activity has shifted the question. It is now posed to folks in the Vanderbilt sports universe who have been underserved for years — the fans and donors.

(Photo: Matthew Maxey / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)