Believe it or not, I’m okay with Jared Curtis changing his mind at the last minute and signing to play for Vanderbilt instead of my favorite team, the University of Georgia Bulldogs.
Have I changed my mind in regard to his football skills? Not really. I still think he’ll probably be a decent to good college quarterback. He might even turn out to have NFL-caliber talent. Only time will tell. If he turns out to be the next Matthew Stafford, that might affect my future thinking.
However, I don’t think he will. Why? With Curtis’s commitment, Vanderbilt only rose in the recruiting rankings from the mid 40s to 29th, while UGA dropped from 2nd to 6th. The Bulldogs will be just fine. The Dawgs are a very young team that is absolutely loaded, literally oozing with talent. If we don’t win a national championship this year, we will be one of the favorites next year.
Gunner Stockton has one more year of eligibility, and once he moves on, it will be the fourth year in the program for Ryan Puglisi and the third year for Ryan Montgomery. Every practice has those two quarterbacks of the future taking snaps against one of the best defenses in the SEC. Also, Coach Smart has shown he’s not afraid to bring in an experienced transfer player to compete for the job.
Should Georgia play Vanderbilt while Curtis is there, I shall not worry too much about losing that game unless the Commodores do some Herculean work to narrow the talent gap between the two programs between now and whoever that future kickoff might take place. Georgia is too talented and too disciplined to lose a game against a lesser opponent like Vanderbilt with their talent differential, who won’t have the experienced Diego Pavia pulling a rabbit out of a hat every game next year.
If Curtis starts as a true freshman, his learning curve will be very steep. Honestly, I’m not surprised Curtis changed his mind at the last second and decided to stay home. It was rather nauseating to watch the effort put in to sway Curtis by everyone from Diego Pavia making a pitch to him in a post-game interview to comedian Nate Bargatze practically giving him a tongue bath, begging the young man to flip his commitment on television during ESPN GameDay. He’s still a kid, and famous people were not only talking about him on national television, they were literally begging him to stay home. It was enormous pressure to put on a young man who hasn’t yet graduated from high school. He may have just made a terrible business decision.
I think it’s fair to say if Curtis had really meant what he said about wanting to win the SEC and national championships and the Heisman trophy, he would have honored his commitment to UGA where he could eventually play for the team about to compete for another SEC championship. Georgia has played for the conference championship each of the last four years and won twice, and won back-to-back national championships. The odds obviously favor Georgia repeating that formula over Vanderbilt enjoying unprecedented success and winning ten games for the second time in program history.
I would also like to remind my fellow Dawg fans that we’ve had more than one 5-star quarterback recently on the team (even at the same time), and neither one of them could crack the starting lineup once Stetson Bennett established himself as the team’s leader. Brock Vandagriff transferred to Kentucky and eventually retired from football. J.T. Daniels was a 5-star high school quarterback recruit and ranked the #1 overall player by Rivals.com but he transferred twice after leaving Georgia and ended his playing career at Rice University. Daniels is now is an offensive analyst for the University of West Georgia. They were both terrific high school quarterbacks. Just not quite good enough.
My point is, it isn’t easy to estimate how a high school player will fare in college. Jared Curtis could be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the transition from high school to college will prove far more difficult than he anticipates. Only time will tell. However, if Clark Lea can’t repeat this year’s success and build a decent team from the transfer portal, Jared Curtis won’t have enough Jimmy’s and Joe’s on the offensive line and the team’s skill positions to make a difference against a team like UGA. The Commodores are virtually guaranteed to take a step backward next year.
And even if the teams were more evenly matched, Kirby Smart is probably the best game day coach in the country and the best overall coach in college football, period. He’s not afraid to take calculated risks to reap the potential reward. He turns unheralded “3-star” players like Stetson Bennett and Javon Bullard into NFL players and 5-star players into 1st round picks.
Mike Bobo is a terrific offensive coordinator. The point is, we’re going to be just fine. Jared Curtis could turn out to be a tremendous player but I can’t see Vanderbilt ever playing for the SEC championship, and I trust our coaches to find quality players who can perform in the position consistently at or near the highest levels. Kirby’s desire to win is virtually insatiable. More often than not, he’ll figure out a way.
But there is one thing about the whole ordeal that does continue to bother me, so I’m going to say something about it to get it off my chest. I wasn’t a big fan of Curtis being openly dishonest after reports had begun to circulate suggesting he was about to flip his commitment. Less than 24 hours before signing day the major recruiting services began to report that Curtis was flipping to the Commodores. Curtis contacted reporters and went out of his way to and deny the reports and claimed that he hadn’t de-committed from Georgia. Yet less than an hour later, he drops the formal announcement that he’d flipped to Vanderbilt, only hours before signing his letter of intent.
There were several ways he could have handled the situation better. He could have said nothing, waited another hour, and then dropped his little bombshell. He could have contacted reporters and said he had no idea how the word had spread before he’d made any official announcement, and confirmed the report was accurate. He did neither. He lied, on purpose, knowing that he was writing his social media announcement at that very moment while pretending he remained committed to UGA.
Let me put it this way…if I was Jared Curtis, I probably would have signed with Vanderbilt. He’s from Nashville. He doesn’t even have to live in a dorm unless he wants. He could simply commute from home. It is simply inconceivable that he might duplicate the success of Stetson Bennett during his career at Vanderbilt, and rather lofty expectations that his success might mirror that of Diego Pavia. During coach Clark Lea’s tenure as head coach of the Commodores, Vanderbilt has gone 2-10, 5-7, 2-10, 6-5, and finally 10-2 this year. Coincidentally, the team has been led by Diego Pavia the past two years. Next year, without a lot of luck, their record will probably revert to somewhere between 2-10 and 5-7. It wasn’t the fact that Curtis flipped his commitment that troubled me. It was the way he handled it. It indicates both a lack of maturity and possibly a bit of an ego problem, where his interest in seeking attention took precedence over his obligations to the teams involved.
It was a drama queen move.
Players like that don’t normally function well or last very long in the Bulldog “full immersion” team experience where the motto is apparently still “big team, little me.” People with big egos tend to put their personal statistics above the best interests of the team, and Kirby Smart will bench a quarterback for making too many silly mistakes. Kirby will bench anybody whose play is detrimental to the team.
Hopefully, the whole dishonesty issue with Curtis is an aberration, not the start of a pattern. I wish him the best in his college career except in any games against UGA. I mean, it’s not like he flipped his commitment to Alabama. He just wanted to stay home. Like I said, I really can’t blame the kid. I just wish he hadn’t decided to jerk around UGA fans the day before signing day. I really don’t want to think his mother was complicit in the “flip” plan as she was insisting her son remained committed to Georgia on social media. If not for the public deception, I really wouldn’t have any hard feelings. Like I said, you really can’t blame a kid for wanting to stay home.
We can fault him for how he handled the situation, though.
I’m still somewhat intrigued to see how his game might transition from a smaller private high school to playing against the best teams in the SEC. His film was exciting to watch even if the competition wasn’t playing at the highest level and it was in Tennessee, a state not nearly as talent-rich as Georgia when it comes to high school football. On the one hand, some of the plays Curtis made on tape would have looked good if the competition had only been air. The kid appears to be a fierce competitor, a talented runner and has a great arm. If Vanderbilt sucks for the next two years, I don’t think anyone will be able to put all the blame on him. It will more than likely be due to the lack of supporting talent around Curtis. Vanderbilt is never going to be able to recruit like Georgia. Not in my lifetime.
Gunner Stockton is exactly the type of quarterback and leader the Georgia Bulldogs need. In the biggest games he tends to throw more touchdown passes than incompletions. Gunner was born to be a Dawg. Gunner has already won more SEC championship rings than I expect Jared will ever own from his tenure at Vanderbilt. Curtis can still hope to win the Heisman, and I can hope maybe he’s good enough to win it one day. I still don’t believe Vanderbilt will ever be good enough to hoist the SEC championship trophy because I can’t imagine them ever being good enough to beat the Bulldogs.
Go Dawgs! Sic ’em!
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