Let all the Bulldog faithful rally behind the men who now wear the red and black with two words, two simple words which express the sentiments of the entire Bulldog Nation: Auburn Sucks.
All that money, maneuvering, and lawyering and their starter sounds like a guy who would be leading the Sons of Anarchy, not the Commodores. Methinks Curtis will be getting some playing time in the earlier part of the season and they’ll hand him the reins gradually, or maybe Blaze is the next Diego Pavia. Who knows…who cares.
Meanwhile, the Bobby Hillbilllies have anointed a true freshman as their starting quarterback:
He’s the first true freshman to start at quarterback for the Vols since Brent Schaeffer in 2004, when the Vols went on to play for the SEC Championship only to lose to Auburn. I think 2004 might have been one of Auburn’s mythical national championship years, so there’s that.
Vanderbilt comes to town on October 3rd, and what would be a normal Homecoming game against a (formerly) SEC weakling is somewhat more interesting chiefly because of a recruiting saga gone south (or gone north?) that involved Jared Curtis.
Getting our first five start quarterback to Georgia since Justin Fields and Brock Van der Griff seemed like a big deal at the time, although most of us were skeptical. One, we know Kirby’s history with five star quarterbacks. Two, we know our history with five star blue chips on the offensive side of the ball since NIL. It seemed impossible, and, it probably was.
He committed to Georgia, though, then de-committed, and committed again.
And then, something amazing happened. Amazing, not in the awesome sense, but more in the amazingly WTF way.
“Diego goes to one of his games on a Friday night,” Tim Beck recalled. “Diego calls me that night, and he says, ‘Hey, man, you got to see this kid’. I go, ‘Yeah, we know about him, we know about him, Diego’. He (Diego) didn’t think we knew about him. It’s like, ‘yeah Diego, we know about him, but he’s not interested in us, he’s committed to Georgia’. And he goes, “Well, I talked to him. I think he’s interested’.”
As for that next morning, after the late-night call from a stunned Pavia, Beck would come to find out that not only was Jared Curtis interested in the Commodores, he made it a priority to pay attention to what Vanderbilt was doing on the field.
“He really didn’t have a favorite team that he was. He really didn’t have a favorite player that he watched,” Beck told OutKick. “And so, I called Jared the next morning, on a Saturday morning, and I talked to him a little bit, and one of the first things i said is, ‘Hey, I know you, you haven’t been really been watching much ball, but I was just curious’.
“And before I got through my sentence, he stopped me and said, ‘Coach, I got to be honest with you, the only team I’ve watched this year has been Vanderbilt’.”
So Curtis was brought to Vanderbilt by a wandering Diego Pavia who didn’t even know who he was. Amazing. But wait…there’s more…
So, when noted attorney Ryan Downton and his highly regarded, successful wife, Pearl Downton, decided it was time to invest their time into the NIL space of college athletics, they needed to know Curtis was first making the decision to attend Vanderbilt for the right reasons.
There were no monetary offers when the quarterback started to engage with Vanderbilt on a more consistent basis, which came when the Commodores hosted Missouri last season, which also brought “College Gameday” come to town.
In fact, the Downtons had not even thought about starting an NIL IP entity that could help Vanderbilt athletes, even though they were fully-engaged as donors and fans of the program.
But, once they knew this wasn’t just a ploy from Curtis to drive up the price and that the five-star actually wanted to stay in Nashville to create his own legacy like the one he was witnessing Pavia put a bow on, it was time for the family to start making calls.
Nate Bargatze speaks during ESPN’s College GameDay at Vanderbilt University on Oct. 25, 2025, in Nashville, Tenn. (Getty Images)
First, it was Jay Cutler, who just happened to be their next door neighbor. Once the former Vanderbilt quarterback was in, then it was time to call noted Nashvillian Nate Bargatze. It just so happened that Bargatze was already in, having mentioned on “College Gameday” that Curtis would be invited to have a small role in a movie he was starring in.
For what it’s worth, the Downtons represented Pavia in his litigation against the NCAA. Shocker.
In other words, Jared Curtis was brought to Nashville by the worst of modern college football…star-power NIL money, attorneys who argue for it, and an athlete who benefitted from it all.
If you didn’t have enough reason to pull for an all-out massacre of Vanderbilt on October 3rd, hopefully this helps.
With recent news that freshman wunderkind Jared Curtis won’t be starting for Vanderbilt, and interesting option has come to light.
The Baltimore Ravens cut Pavia, the former Vanderbilt University star quarterback, on Thursday. The Ravens open full-squad training camp practices next Wednesday, so Pavia didn’t even make it to the start of camp.
That’s good.
And bad.
Both.
It’s probably the best timing for Pavia because he was a long shot to make the Baltimore roster anyway.
After going unselected in the 2026 NFL Draft, he is now free to sign with another NFL team before training camp begins, giving coaches a longer look as he competes for a roster spot.
If that’s not an option, one supposes Pavia can set his sights on maybe catching on with a CFL team that might have a QB need as a result of an injury. The CFL season runs through October.
But being cut at this stage is also a blow to Pavia because it says the team that showed the most interest in adding him after the draft, bringing him in for a workout and keeping him around the entire offseason, has decided he’s not good enough.
