Sarah Fuller called out Vanderbilt in a halftime speech, it was awesome, and now Derek Mason is gone

Vanderbilt announced that they fired their head coach Derek Mason the day after Sarah Fuller, the very first woman to play in a Power Five conference football game, was put on the pitch.

Derek Mason has had a disappointing career as head coach of the Vanderbilt Commodores. From 2014 until this year he was 27-54, capped off with a 0-8 start to the season. He had led Vanderbilt to two bowl appearances, losing both. It’s the kind of resume that leads a coach out of being the coach. It was a good decision.

It wasn’t because of Sarah Fuller that Mason got fired, but man, those are really bad eyes. On the surface, it felt like bad timing, a school lacking in self-awareness to allow Fuller’s story to unfold for a fanbase with nothing else to celebrate. Why empty the trainer now? Why, in a lost season, is Vanderbilt so anxious to leave Mason, whom they’ve had for nearly seven years?

This is where it gets interesting. Apparently Sarah Fuller, whose soccer team had just won the SEC Conference Championship, gave a pretty powerful halftime speech to the soccer team and called them out on their shit.

Before you go on a tangent of trying to explain to me that it seems out of place for Fuller to step into that position and talk to a team she has just literally joined, before you’ve even stepped on the pitch, do not do it. I don’t care about any of that at all. After a conference championship, Fuller expects greatness. She holds her team responsible and I love it.

“Coaches came over to me and said, ‘I’ve been wanting to say that for a while now,” Fuller told ESPN’s Courtney Cronin. This, thisThis is why a struggling coach was relieved of his duties earlier than most people would have thought.

It is a blatant and shocking demonstration of a lack of leadership.

The kicker, who had been playing football for five days, had the guts and courage to tell the team what the head coach, who had been a head coach since 2014, didn’t want. It has nothing to do with Sarah Fuller being a woman – it has to do with leadership. I don’t care if Fuller was a woman, a man, a senior or a freshman in a red shirt – she said what Derek Mason didn’t want. Derek Mason lost the locker room and was fired for it.