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.

FTMFs.