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As Vanderbilt’s 2026 football season approaches, the biggest question facing the Commodores is who will replace Diego Pavia, who led Vanderbilt to its first 10-win season in school history in 2025.
And Vanderbilt has, by some accounts, the top-ranked freshman quarterback coming in to fall camp. This should be an obvious answer, right? And yet Clark Lea still hasn’t named a starting quarterback. Even though all signs point to the aforesaid Jared Curtis being the starter, we don’t know that officially. And that’s fine.
There is an art to naming a starting quarterback. Do you have a returning starter who played well the previous season? Or do you have a transfer portal addition who everybody knows you spent a lot of money to add to the roster? Fine, then, go ahead and name him the starter before fall camp. Those are the situations where nobody will question the decision.
If those don’t apply, though, the coach gains nothing by naming a starter before he absolutely has to. Lea learned this the hard way in 2022, when he named Mike Wright — who was a serviceable quarterback in relief of Ken Seals in 2021, but hadn’t established himself as a clear number 1 — the starting quarterback prior to fall camp, only to pull Wright three games into the season for true freshman AJ Swann, then spent much of the remainder of the season playing musical chairs. Had Lea not jumped the gun in naming a starter, switching quarterbacks in September might not have seemed like a knee-jerk reaction — nor would going back to Wright later in the season.
(This, of course, looked even worse in 2023 when Swann got benched in favor of 2021 starter and TCU bowl game legend Ken Seals.)
This is all to say that as obvious as it looks on paper that Curtis will be the starter, there’s no reason to come out and say that now. What happens if Curtis struggles early in the season? Do you bench him for Blaze Berlowitz? What does that then say about the coaching staff’s ability to evaluate quarterbacks?
As disastrous as the early Derek Mason years were, one thing that I think back to here was how he handled the quarterback room prior to the 2015 season. After the debacle in 2014, nobody had a clear claim on the starting quarterback job entering the 2015 season (okay, okay, Piece of String was there all along.) Vanderbilt did have a quarterback prospect coming in in Kyle Shurmur who, while not on Curtis’s level as a recruit, looked like a guy who was the future at the position. Mason spent all fall camp holding a “quarterback competition” before naming Johnny McCrary the starter immediately prior to the season opener but making very clear that it was a close call. That made it a much more defensible decision when McCrary was pulled for Shurmur after a poor performance at South Carolina.
There’s nothing wrong with making Curtis earn it, or at least letting fans believe it.
