Diego Pavia is gone, but his shadow still hangs over Clark Lea at Vanderbilt. The Commodores are asking a freshman quarterback, Jared Curtis, to carry the kind of weight Pavia handled last season, and that is where the pressure begins, according to a prominent analyst.

“I’m worried about the Diego Pavia effect,” Brett Ciancia of PickSixPreviews said about Vanderbilt’s 2026 outlook. “This guy did so much for his team. So many plays where the line broke down, and he’s going off script, scrambling, very creative with the ball; he can run it himself. He just did so much for Vanderbilt. It might’ve been covering up some other positional issues.”

That point is difficult to ignore. Diego Pavia accounted for 7,495 total yards and 67 touchdowns across his final 26 college games. He finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting, but Ciancia believes his influence stretched further than the production.

“He wasn’t just a Heisman candidate,” he said. “He was like a transcendental figure for them.”

He even pointed to the number of coaches studying Diego Pavia’s film during the offseason, trying to understand how he consistently turned broken plays into big gains. Nebraska OC Dana Holgorsen was among those who spent time analyzing that tape. But of course, Ciancia isn’t questioning Jared Curtis’ long-term future. He believes the 5-star QB will come good in time. 

His concern is with everything that Vanderbilt has lost with Diego Pavia’s departure. In his view, Diego Pavia had a rare knack for making something out of nothing, and replacing that kind of playmaker won’t be an easy job for the program. Brett Ciancia also argued that the Commodores still lag behind the rest of the SEC when it comes to overall talent. 

Vanderbilt ranked fairly low in five-year recruiting rankings, in transfer portal talent, and in projected NFL draft picks. To him, it shows last season’s success isn’t likely to carry over, and a step back feels more likely than another breakthrough. Despite the concerns, Clark Lea isn’t expecting Jared Curtis to become the next Diego Pavia either.

“I don’t actually believe that that player needs to perform the way that Diego performed,” he told ESPN at SEC Media Days. “I think it’s a great statement for our program to be able to go and recruit the No. 1 player in the country. I love the fact that he hails from Nashville… Now we’ve got to be patient enough with him to make sure that he’s not out there until he’s ready.”

The confidence is understandable, but the task won’t be easy. Vanderbilt returns just 38 percent of last season’s offensive production. TE Eli Stowers and WR Tre Richardson are gone. Several starting offensive linemen are gone, too. Whether Jared Curtis or veteran Blaze Berlowitz wins the QB job, they’ll be stepping into an offense that looks very different from the one Diego Pavia led.

Last season proved Vanderbilt could compete with the SEC’s best. Now comes the harder part, and that’s showing it can do it without the QB who changed everything.