Blaze Berlowitz out a month with broken collarbone

Clark Lea made it official on Monday, and the timeline is not a short one.

Pete Nakos

@PeteNakos

Vanderbilt backup QB Blaze Berlowitz has undergone surgery to repair a broken collarbone and will be out for a month, Clark Lea announced. Started against Georgia with Jared Curtis injured. t.co/jEM02D8HGM

One correction to the version of this going around: Vanderbilt is not down to its third-stringer. Curtis missed the Georgia game, but he is healthy again and still QB1. Berlowitz got hurt mopping up. He came in midway through the 4th quarter of the 52-17 loss to Ole Miss, led a touchdown drive, then took a late hit on an incomplete pass in the last minutes of a game that was long over. The defender got flagged for unnecessary roughness. That doesn't do much for a broken collarbone.

That is a lousy way for Berlowitz's season to stall, because it has already been a strange one. He started Vanderbilt's first 2 games, then lost the job to 5-star freshman Jared Curtis during the Delaware game. Curtis is the kid Vanderbilt flipped from Georgia, so naturally he was the one held out of the Georgia game with a lower-body injury picked up in a 21-15 loss at Auburn. Lea told the SEC Network Curtis was 'not ready to play physically,' and Berlowitz got the start in Athens.

Georgia won that one 38-14 at Sanford Stadium. Still, Berlowitz did what a backup is supposed to do: show up with almost no notice, play the full game against an SEC heavyweight and keep the room steady while the freshman got healthy. Lea had praise for how he handled getting bumped earlier in the year, calling him 'a great teammate' and saying his attitude was 'reflective of the kind of person that we want in our program.'

The real cost is depth. With Berlowitz out, the next guy if Curtis gets banged up again is junior Whit Muschamp or sophomore Jack Elliott. Muschamp led the backup race heading into fall camp and threw a couple of passes against Georgia. That's not a lot of experience to lean on behind a true freshman who has already missed a game this year.

So the thing to watch is Curtis's health. If he stays upright for the next month, this is a footnote and Berlowitz could be back for the stretch run. If Curtis takes another hit, Vanderbilt is starting someone with basically no SEC film in the middle of a conference schedule that has already handed them 3 losses in a row.