Berlowitz beats Curtis for Vanderbilt's QB1 job
Blaze Berlowitz gets the first snaps of the post-Diego Pavia era, but Clark Lea made clear five-star freshman Jared Curtis is playing too — and this is only a Week 1 decision.
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Vanderbilt has its answer to the only question that mattered all camp: senior Blaze Berlowitz will take the first snap of the post-Diego Pavia era when the Commodores open against Austin Peay on September 5. He beat out Jared Curtis, the five-star true freshman who flipped his commitment from Georgia to Nashville last December and is, by recruiting rank, the best prospect this program has ever signed. That Berlowitz — a senior who spent his career behind Pavia — held him off at all is the story of camp.
Clark Lea did not dress it up as a closed competition. "I know there's a lot of interest in the quarterback conversations, and we made the decision earlier in the week that it's best for our offense right now to organize in the first game around Blaze taking the first snaps," Lea said, per SI. "He has earned the right to do that." Pete Thamel reported Curtis will also play and get his first career snaps against the Governors — this was never framed as a full handoff, just Week 1.
Curtis has not exactly cooled off waiting his turn. Lea told On3 after a mid-August scrimmage that the freshman "probably had his best day, just start to finish, which is really positive" and is "adapting to college football," a line that reads like a coach setting up a change before the season is out. Vanderbilt fans get the rare treat of an actual quarterback plot on opening night, not just an opponent to forget by October.
Last season ended on a bowl loss, and a very different QB
Vanderbilt closed out last season with a 34-27 loss to Iowa, a finish that came after a four-game run through November that included wins over Auburn (45-38), Kentucky (45-17) and Tennessee (45-24) sandwiched around a 34-31 defeat to Texas. That stretch was Diego Pavia's team at its most explosive — 45 points three separate times — and it is the standard the new starter now inherits.
Pavia is gone, and so is the tight end who caught a lot of those touchdowns, Eli Stowers. Lea was blunt about the gap in July: "We won't replicate Diego," he told Brett McMurphy, which is as close as a coach gets to admitting his old quarterback isn't walking through that door again. Whatever last season's finish said about this offense, it said it with a different guy taking snaps — which is exactly why the Berlowitz-Curtis decision carries as much weight as it does.
Austin Peay is not just a name on the schedule
The Governors are not the pushover a home opener against an FCS name usually promises. Austin Peay returns preseason UAC Offensive Player of the Year Chris Parson at quarterback, a dual-threat who threw for more than 3,000 yards and ran for 743 more with 37 total touchdowns last season, and he's got a preseason All-American lineman in Joshua Sales Jr. protecting him, per ClarksvilleNow. This is the same Austin Peay team that held SEC champion Georgia to just 28 points in Athens last year.
History is lopsided — Vanderbilt is 2-0 all-time against the Governors, including a 47-7 win the last time these teams met back in 2015 — but that head-to-head record predates every player on either roster. Vanderbilt is favored by a lot for a reason, but a quarterback who can both throw for 300 and run for 100 in the same afternoon is exactly the kind of opponent that makes a season opener more interesting than the spread suggests.
A 30.5-point favorite at home to open the Berlowitz era
Vanderbilt opens the season on September 5 vs. Austin Peay at FirstBank Stadium, and the line opened at Vanderbilt -30.5 with the total set at 61.5 — a number that says the market expects both the new starter and the freshman waiting behind him to move the ball early and often. A 30-plus point number for a home opener against a team that just held Georgia to 28 is either about to look conservative or about to look exactly right, and either way it's the first real data point on what this offense looks like without Pavia running it.
It's also the first live look at how Lea splits snaps between Berlowitz and Curtis once the whistle actually blows, which makes kickoff more compelling than most 30-point spreads ever are.