In 2023, coach Clark Lea didn’t do enough to help Vanderbilt football evolve the way he intended, he said Tuesday at his media availability.

That team finished 2-10, with the two wins coming in the first two games of the season. The Commodores lost all their games against Power Five competition by double digits.

Virginia Tech, the Commodores’ opponent on Saturday, started 2-4 with losses to Rutgers, Purdue and Marshall before finishing 7-6. New Mexico State started 2-3 and finished 10-5. Among a slate of wholesale changes in the offseason, Lea brought in former Aggies head coach Jerry Kill, offensive coordinator Tim Beck and quarterback Diego Pavia.

“A team that improves through the season is a testament of a good coaching staff, and I think it was a measure of my performance as head coach,” Lea said. “I thought that last year, it wasn’t for lack of trying, I just never found the formula to get that group to go beyond the performance we delivered.”

Although improvement through the season is somewhat of a litmus test for Lea, 2024 starts with an important game right off the bat. In the Hokies on Saturday (11 a.m. CT, ESPN), Vanderbilt will be facing a bowl team from a year ago. To have any hope of getting to six wins, the Commodores will likely need to defeat Virginia Tech.

During the 2021 season, Lea’s first, the team also finished 2-10. But Lea said he felt there was hope at the end of that season, and in 2022, Vanderbilt started 3-6 before winning two games in November to get to 5-7 − albeit with a crushing loss to Tennessee at the end.

“If I were to share a disappointment that I had, outside of the pain of the results from last season, it would be that I didn’t do enough to get our program to evolve into change,” Lea said. “And it just felt like we could never get that team to the performance that we were proud of, and we suffered because of it. So I’m really interested to start the season. I certainly would love to get off to a great start, that would obviously be a lot of fun.”

Lea took over as the defensive coordinator himself after firing Nick Howell. Lea said that calling the defense himself has been one of his most fun times. With Lea focusing more on defensive duties, Kill has been designated the de facto “head coach of the offense,” with Beck calling plays there.

It will be weeks or months before we truly know how well Lea’s rebuild has worked, but as Lea knows, Saturday against the Hokies will be a big clue as to how 2024 will go.

DIEGO PAVIA How Vanderbilt football transfer Diego Pavia’s unrelenting competitiveness landed in Nashville

Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at agerson@gannett.com or on Twitter @aria_gerson.

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Starting this week — and for the first time since January 2023 — the West Virginia Office of Drug Control Policy has a permanent director.

Dr. Stephen Loyd, an internal medicine and addiction medicine physician from Tennessee, began work on Monday after being named as head of the agency last month. 

With a medical degree from East Tennessee State University, Loyd previously worked as the chief medical officer at Cedar Recovery in Mount Juliet, Tennessee. He also sat as chair of the state’s Opioid Abatement Council. Before that, he served as Tennessee’s top drug policy expert, holding the position of opioid czar for the state’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Use for about two years.

Loyd’s first act as head of the state  Office of Drug Control Policy was presenting to lawmakers on the Joint Standing Committee on Health, where he shared what his approach will be in his new office and what he believes could help the state be successful in confronting the ongoing drug and overdose epidemic.

“West Virginia has been ground zero for the opioid crisis. It’s where it started. It’s where it’s continued today, and there have been a lot of really great people in this state that have worked really hard and because of whatever reasons, we are where we are, right?” Loyd said. “I think it would be a great thing if West Virginia showed the rest of the country how to get out of this crisis, and I think that we can do that.”

An integral part to confronting the epidemic, Loyd said, is increasing attention on measurable outcomes of what works when it comes to addiction. He said the state needs to get “creative” in approaches and ensure that responses are coordinated and strategic, with communication between different agencies that deal with people impacted by substance use disorder.

The first places he plans to look at, he said, are the state’s criminal justice system and Medicaid.

“There’s no state in the United States that’s going to address the opioid crisis effectively in their state without addressing criminal justice. It’s not going to happen,” Loyd said. “So many people are imprisoned in our jails and our penitentiaries in the United States that are secondary to substance use disorder. That number is so big, it won’t matter what you do outside of there, if you don’t address it there, we will be failures, I promise you that.”

When people who have substance use disorder are released from incarceration, they are 40 times more likely to overdose and die in the days after their release than others in their communities, Loyd said. 

“That is one of the biggest gaps that we have right now,” Loyd said. “That is low hanging fruit, and we can go after that, but we’ve got to have quality places in our community that are treating people, that accept Medicaid, that have standards of care that I think that this legislative body can put in place to ensure this happens. I’m going to bring those ideas before you, I promise you that in short order.”

Generally, Loyd said, the state needs to improve its use of data analytics. Loyd said he would like to see the state make “a small investment up front” to create a “roadmap” for response. 

Loyd previously worked as a voluntary co-chair of The Helios Alliance, an Alabama-based organization that is using “innovative, transformative [and] evidence-based technologies” to confront the opioid epidemic while educating the public on interventions. He is not currently listed on the organization’s website as a co-chair and it’s unclear when he left that position.

In March, Loyd told KFF Health News that he believes statistical modeling and artificial intelligence can be used to create a simulation of the opioid crisis that could predict what kinds of programs would be most effective at saving lives. That modeling, he said, can help direct local officials on how to best invest money they receive through opioid settlement funds. It’s unclear where the efforts to create this modeling — which was estimated to cost about $1.5 million for Alabama — currently stands. According to KFF, the Helios Alliance was also “in discussions” with leaders in Tennessee and West Virginia to create simulations.

When it comes to getting creative with responses, Loyd said leaders should be looking at policies and laws that already exist and potentially using them in a new way. He referred to mental hygiene holds, which allow for people who have the potential to harm themselves or others being held for several days to undergo psychological evaluation.

If that law could be used for someone who injects drugs — which, he said, presents a clear danger to the person — providers could use that time to try and get the person into a system of recovery. To do that, however, there must be a dependable system in place for them to enter into. He said he plans to start immediately learning about West Virginia’s recovery infrastructure and what challenges exist there.

Loyd told lawmakers that part of what drives his dedication to addiction work is his own experiences with the disease. The inspiration for Michael Keaton’s character in the Hulu limited series “Dopesick” (based on the 2018 book of the same name by journalist Beth Macy), Loyd has been in recovery from opioid and benzodiazepine addiction for 20 years.

He wants to ensure that, through his work, people who live with substance use disorder are afforded the same opportunities he was to enter a system of recovery that works and reclaim their lives.

“This is my life,” Loyd said. “I wake up every morning with one goal, and that’s to help as many people find recovery as humanly possible. That’s it. I don’t care really about anything else.”

Different people, Loyd said, will have different paths to recovery. The important thing is ensuring that there are sound and dependable systems in place for them to utilize, no matter what their path looks like. 

“We have to talk about evidence-based prevention strategies that are going to work. And guys, I don’t care about what the politics are behind it. I don’t care about what the push is behind it,” Loyd said. “I want to do things that work and that save people’s lives and give them an opportunity to do the things that I’ve been given an opportunity to do in my life.”