Pate Isn't Buying The Vanderbilt Cliff Talk Just Yet
Everyone assumes Vanderbilt craters without Diego Pavia. Pate looked at what's happening with Jared Curtis in fall camp and said not so fast.
Vanderbilt lost the best quarterback of the Clark Lea era. Pate's not ready to declare the season lost because of it.
That's the claim he made on Monday's show, and it runs directly against what he called the room's default position. Diego Pavia is gone, the guy who built Vanderbilt's entire modern identity, and the assumption everywhere else has been that the Commodores regress hard without him. Pate looked at the camp reports coming out of Nashville and decided that assumption is getting ahead of itself.
Here's what a reader needs to know walking in. Vanderbilt scrimmaged Saturday. Jared Curtis, the five-star quarterback who had been committed to Georgia before Vandy flipped him, has spent camp in a competition with Burlowitz for the starting job.
The case
Pate's reasoning starts with what came out of that scrimmage, not with sentiment. Curtis, he said, had his best practice of camp when Vanderbilt scrimmaged, and Pate expects that performance to settle the competition in his favor. That's a specific, verifiable data point โ not a vibe about talent or recruiting rankings, but a claim about who won a specific rep session on a specific day.
From there Pate drew the line to the season. As he put it on Monday's show: โI, for the record, am not a blind believer that things just have to drop off for Vanderbilt this year.โ
He was careful to frame it as an observation, not a forecast โ Pate noted the show wasn't in the business of predictions that night, just camp scoop. But the distinction matters less than the direction. He restated the same idea moments later, tighter and blunter: โI don't think that things have to fall off a cliff for Vany this yearโ
The consensus take treats Pavia's departure as an automatic downgrade because he was the engine of everything Vanderbilt did well the last two seasons. Pate's counter isn't that Curtis is already better. It's that a five-star arm winning a real competition in live scrimmage reps is meaningfully different from a name-value downgrade on paper. Programs don't fall off a cliff because a good player left. They fall off a cliff when nothing shows up to replace him. Pate's argument is that something is showing up.
Nobody in this stretch of the show got dismissed to make that point. Pate credited the degree of difficulty Pavia leaves behind before he ever got to Curtis, and he didn't pretend the competition is settled beyond doubt โ only that the early signal points one direction.
The honest complication
Here's the part that keeps this from being a slam dunk. One strong scrimmage is one data point against a full season of tape that made Pavia what he was. Curtis has never played a competitive snap in the SEC. A quarterback competition decided in August fall camp, against a program's own defense, is not the same evidence as a quarterback proving it against Alabama or Georgia in November. The universal consensus that Vanderbilt drops off didn't form out of nowhere โ it formed because replacing a proven, battle-tested SEC starter with an unproven true talent is historically a downgrade more often than not. Pate's take is a bet on trajectory over track record, and trajectory bets are the ones that can look great in August and quiet by October.
That's the honest tension. Pate isn't ignoring it. He's just choosing not to assume the worst before the guy has taken a real snap.
The next data point isn't a scrimmage. It's a season opener against real competition, and that's where this take gets tested in public. Go watch the Jared Curtis segment in Monday's show and decide for yourself whether one good scrimmage is enough evidence to bet against the cliff.
Watch the Full Episode
Articles are drafted from Josh Pate's College Football Show under the site's editorial standards and monitored by the editorial team โ corrections are timestamped, never silent.