Is a coach who has never led his team to a winning record a likely target to be hired somewhere else? Vanderbilt is on a very short list of schools where that could happen, and it might happen this year.

I mean no disrespect to Commodores coach Bobby Johnson, who has Vanderbilt at 4-0 and ranked #19 heading into a home game against Auburn, one that ESPN GameDay will grace with its presence. No one would have suspected these developments as recently as a month ago, and I’m plenty excited about it. I’ve said before that Johnson is doing as well as anyone possibly could at Vanderbilt, and I sure hope he stays a long, long time.

The problem for Vanderbilt is that Johnson is doing well enough to be noticed nationally at a time when Tommy Bowden, coach at Johnson’s alma mater Clemson University, isn’t. Bowden is failing to live up to expectations for yet another year, and it’s no stretch to say that he may not be the Tigers coach next September.

I think it would be a lot tougher for Johnson to turn down his Tigers than it was for him to shrug off interest from Duke awhile back. One Georgia fan and blogger predicted that Johnson will become Clemson’s next coach way back at the beginning of September, before Vanderbilt beat South Carolina and Ole Miss and wound up in the Top 25. He incorrectly picked the Gamecocks to defeat the Commodores, though, so I’m hoping that’s not all he’s wrong about. Vanderbilt needs to do whatever it can, assuming there is something it can do, to keep Johnson on board of what is emerging as a very solid Commodore ship. Go Dores!