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If you’re a college football fan, odds are you’ve probably seen Jesse Pullen’s face before. The Vanderbilt grad accidentally became a meme in 2017 when CBS camera crews caught him sitting alone in the stands of Vanderbilt Stadium with Alabama up 52-0 on the Commodores heading into the fourth quarter.
Pullen — whom the internet quickly nicknamed “Sad Vandy Kid” — had high hopes for the Commodores, 3-0 at the time, earlier that day when campus tailgates were buzzing with excitement. But by the end of the third quarter, Vanderbilt had no points, and Pullen had no friends left in the stadium.
Just not Vandy’s day. pic.twitter.com/VJkjDN4dDS
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) September 23, 2017
Every college football season, that meme seems to pop up in some way or another for Pullen, whose phone usually buzzes a little more than usual this time of year. It happened again last week — but under more positive circumstances — when a user on X photoshopped Dr. Emmett Brown from the popular film “Back to the Future” into the photo next to Pullen and wrote a caption that Pullen could have never comprehended that miserable day for his Commodores.
“This hurts now, but in 8 years …”
Back to the Future Part 4
Doc Brown: “This hurts now, but in 8 years…” pic.twitter.com/w6nA442vv6
— McGoogs (@GoogsMc) October 22, 2025
Eight years later, Vanderbilt’s 2025 football team is rolling. The Commodores are 7-1, ranked No. 9 in the AP Top 25 and have a legitimate shot to make a College Football Playoff as the calendar creeps toward November.
Things are going quite well for the program. And for inquiring minds wondering how Pullen is doing these days, well, he’s not sad anymore, either. His football team is America’s sweetheart, and he graduated from Ohio State’s medical school last spring. He is now a first-year resident at Ohio State in a dual internal medicine and emergency medicine program.
“Life is good,” he said. “These days, I have a pull between two allegiances, I guess, being here at Ohio State, but it’s been fun as a Vandy fan being able to continue to support them.
“It’s been wild to see how far the program’s come. Coach (Clark) Lea and (quarterback) Diego (Pavia) and just the energy on campus is something else.”
Pullen said he had no idea he’d gone viral that day until several hours after the game ended. After Vanderbilt eventually lost 59-0 to coach Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide, Pullen swung by his dorm to charge his phone (which had died), then took off for the campus rec center for a workout.
When he returned from the gym and grabbed his phone, he realized his number of notifications was unusually high.
“My phone was overheating on my nightstand and I was like, ‘What is going on?’” he said. “And I open it up, and it was basically kind of glitching up because there were so many notifications. So I was like, ‘What is happening here?’”
Pullen had a slew of messages — “You’re famous!” and “This is crazy!” — and he even ended up as a Twitter “moment” that day, which, at that time, tracked the day’s top storylines. Just below headlines about hedgehogs and the Golden State Warriors, and just above reports about North Korea and President Donald Trump, there he was: “Sad Vandy kid becomes a meme.”
The next two weeks on campus were particularly chaotic.
“I was getting stopped dozens of times. Like 20 or 30 times a day to talk about it,” Pullen said. “At one point, I hosted some of the prospective students that were high schoolers, and I remember walking into class each week, and my classmates were basically like, ‘Oh, do you know that he’s a meme?’ And so it kind of spread even to just people who would have otherwise had no idea.”
Pullen joked that he’s surprised his meme has persisted for this long and that while meme life isn’t totally for him, it has made for a fun icebreaker with colleagues at the hospital. After Vanderbilt beat No. 1 Alabama last season and students carried the goalposts down to the Cumberland River, Pullen strongly considered purchasing a piece of the goalpost as a keepsake.
“Then I realized I was quickly out of my med-student price range,” he said. “But no, it’s been great.”
Pullen admits that he doesn’t watch as much Vanderbilt football now as he used to. He’s busy with his residency and also has loyalties to the top-ranked Buckeyes. But he catches glimpses when he can, like earlier this month, convincing the Dim sum restaurant he was eating at with his family to turn on the Vanderbilt game.
Seeing how Lea has reinvigorated the program and inspired his team in this era of the sport has Pullen looking at Vanderbilt football in a new light.
“I have nothing but the most … just a ton of awe and respect for what he has done with the program,” Pullen said. “As an alum, (Lea) being an alum, it does mean something different, and you can kind of tell that, and I think they’re incredibly focused on the goal at hand.”
Even though he lives in Columbus now, he made it clear where his loyalties would lie if the Buckeyes and Commodores ever crossed paths in the Playoff. Who would have thought that was even a remote possibility eight years ago?
“I think I might have to stitch together a jersey that’s half (Vanderbilt) and half (Ohio State), (but) no, I think I would probably be rooting for Vandy,” Pullen said.
“Ohio State has enough … hardcore dedicated fans. I think I could take off for the night and truly just support Vandy. Plus, you gotta root for the underdogs, so Vandy all the way.”