Vanderbilt is an academic powerhouse. For regular students the average SAT/gpa is 1500/3.9 taking 6+ AP courses. Probably not 1 single athlete in the hoopgurlz top 100 hits these scores.
Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Notre Dame all give huge breaks on standards to recruited athletes. Football players get the biggest break and can get in at these schools with Sat/gpa of 1100 / 2.5.
This is not controversial or anything new.
The Ivies do the same thing, but they only lower the bar for athletes to say 1300 sat / gpa 3.0, so they end up recruiting from a much smaller pool of athletes, and generally are not competitive on national level.
The politics on recruiting goes back and forth on how low to go on standards. When you see Northwestern or Stanford struggle for a few years, it usually means the regime in power tightened up the academic standards. When boosters complain enough, a new coach will be hired, standards loosened, and more funds for recruiting made available. Rice University another example, currently bad at sports with little wiggle room on academic standards.