Vanderbilt Football to Play Blaze Berlowitz, Jared Curtis Against Delaware – Sports Illustrated

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NASHVILLE – Vanderbilt football’s quarterback competition will continue to bleed a week further into the regular season.
In his weekly Tuesday press conference, Vanderbilt football head coach Clark Lea said that Vanderbilt will go with the same plan reminiscent of the Commodores’ Week 1 win over Austin Peay, deciding to play both Blaze Berlowitz and five-star freshman quarterback Jared Curtis.
Per the Vanderbilt depth chart going into this weekend’s game against Delaware, Berlowitz is listed as Saturday’s starting quarterback, but Lea said both will see action on the field.
“We are,” Lea said when asked if he is planning to play both quarterbacks this weekend. “I want to see Blaze have opportunities to go out and make plays. And I felt like some of Saturday was that he handed the ball off a lot and we were able to create distance before you really got the chance to show the things he was capable of. With Jared, we have a really talented young player and you saw flashes of that Saturday as well.”
The idea of playing two quarterbacks, according to Lea, is to continue to let both Berlowitz and Curtis develop while giving both opportunities to showcase how they execute the offense.
The question is how it will look compared to the game against Austin Peay, though. In the win over the Governors, Berlowitz was the quarterback for five possessions while Curtis was on the field for three of the drives, with the first coming a little after the two-minute warning of the first half.
This time, it may look a little different. After reviewing the film, Lea felt the play calling difference between the two is something he can adjust going into this weekend. The way Vanderbilt operates offensively and attacks the Delaware defense will seemingly look different than Saturday.
“Learning from our first time out doing this, what it should look like and maybe areas where we felt like the call sheet changed a little too dramatically. So I think the way we organize the offense needs to be tighter and better,” Lea said.
Against Austin Peay, Vanderbilt was more of a run-heavy offense when Berlowitz was in and more pass-heavy when Curtis was in the game. In five drives, Berlowitz went 11-for-16 passing for 149 yards while Curtis went 7-for-9 passing for 60 yards in his first two drives.
What will be interesting to see is how that changes as well as the types of throws each quarterback makes. For now, Lea is excited to see how his quarterbacks look as Vanderbilt tries to get to 2-0 on the season.
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Graham Baakko is a writer for Vanderbilt Commodores On SI, primarily covering football, basketball and baseball. Graham is a recent graduate from the University of Alabama, where he wrote for The Crimson White, WVUA-FM, WVUA 23 as he covered a variety of Crimson Tide sports. He also covered South Carolina athletics as a sportswriting intern for GamecockCentral.
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