Berlowitz starts tonight, Curtis debuts too
Blaze Berlowitz gets Vanderbilt's post-Diego Pavia era started at home tonight, with 5-star freshman Jared Curtis waiting on the first snaps of his own career against an Austin Peay team that pushed Georgia a year ago.
Berlowitz starts tonight, but Lea still isn't calling it closed
Clark Lea made it official this week: Blaze Berlowitz starts at quarterback tonight against Austin Peay. "It's best for our offense to organize in the first game around Blaze taking the first snaps," Lea said. "He has earned the right to do that." That's a senior who spent his whole career behind Diego Pavia finally getting his name called first — and per Pete Thamel's reporting, it will be Berlowitz's first career start, with 5-star true freshman Jared Curtis also playing tonight for his first career snaps.
Sources: Vanderbilt senior Blaze Berlowitz will be the starting quarterback to open the season for the Commodores. He’ll make his first career start against Austin Peay on Sept. 5. Five-star true freshman Jared Curtis will also play in that game, marking his first career snaps.
Curtis, the highest-rated recruit in program history after flipping from Georgia to Vanderbilt last December, was one of 4 true freshmen to crack the Commodores' first depth-chart release, and Lea told On3 the 5-star "probably had his best day, just start to finish" in Vanderbilt's fall scrimmage, adding that he's "adapting to college football." And this is not a decision quietly closing at kickoff — per Saturday Down South, Lea told reporters this week that "this is just about the Austin Peay game," pointing to "moments of really strong play from both players" as the reason the door stays open past tonight.
The stakes are real: Lea is trying to replace the quarterback who just led Vanderbilt to its first 10-win season in program history, and he was blunt about the gap in July, telling Brett McMurphy, "We won't replicate Diego." The framing hasn't shifted heading into tonight — "the best 11 will start each game during the season," Lea has said, and "I'm excited to see them both" is not the sentence of a coach who's finished deciding.
Last season ended on a shootout loss to Iowa, with a different guy taking every snap
Vanderbilt finished last season with a 34-27 loss to Iowa, the tail end of a November that also included a 45-38 win over Auburn, a 45-17 rout of Kentucky and a 45-24 win at Tennessee, all wrapped around a 31-34 defeat to Texas. That stretch was Diego Pavia's team at its most explosive — 45 points three separate times — and it's the bar the new starter now has to clear.
Pavia is gone to the NFL, and so is the tight end who caught a lot of those touchdowns, Eli Stowers. Lea was blunt about the gap back in July, telling Brett McMurphy, "We won't replicate Diego" — about as close as a coach gets to admitting his old quarterback isn't walking back through that door. Whatever last season's finish said about this offense, it said it with somebody else at the controls, which is exactly why tonight's quarterback decision carries as much weight as it does.
The new left side of the line belongs to a guy nobody was paying to start
Fall camp produced a line move nobody had projected: Orion Irving beat out Beau Johnson, one of the program's most highly-compensated players and an offseason transfer addition, for a starting tackle spot. Per SI's Vanderbilt beat, Irving "was among the program's best performers on the offensive line throughout camp" and "beat Johnson out, fair and square" — the kind of depth-chart surprise that happens when a staff grades what it sees instead of what it paid for.
Lea's own explanation doubles as the best line of camp: "Orion transferred in with a ton of snap experience a year ago... he's had a really good offseason. This may be one of the most improved players in our program." Johnson isn't buried — Lea says his versatility will still get him snaps inside — but the depth chart Vanderbilt didn't imagine printing when it signed him is exactly the one it printed. Fitting, too, that VandyFootball named Irving its Man of the Month this same week.
Vanderbilt opens as a 30.5-point favorite, against an FCS team that hung 28 on Georgia
Vanderbilt is favored tonight vs. Austin Peay at home, with the line opened at -30.5 and the total set at 61.5, a high-scoring number for a season opener. Austin Peay comes in 1-0 after a 35-17 win over Gardner-Webb, hardly a pushover: the Governors opened this season ranked 17th at the FCS level, and a year ago they were good enough to hold reigning SEC champion Georgia to just 28 points in Athens.
The name to know on the other sideline is Chris Parson, the Mississippi State transfer who threw for 308 yards and a touchdown in the opener, connecting three times with redshirt freshman Denver Harper for 108 yards and a score. It's an imperfect gauge for a Vanderbilt team replacing a Heisman runner-up quarterback of its own, but it's a reminder that tonight's opponent is a program that already knows how to win one it isn't supposed to.