How Tim Beck Assesses Jared Curtis Through Five Days of Vanderbilt Football Fall Camp

NASHVILLE – At around the start of the calendar year, Vanderbilt five-star true freshman quarterback Jared Curtis got to campus to begin his college football career. Eight months in and Curtis is now in the early stages of his first fall camp.

Curtis is in the middle of a quarterback competition and is getting his reps as he fights for the starting job. It is a different playbook and schematics than what he has been used to, so there is a learning curve to go along with learning a college offense.

But it looks to be going well and it seems like his coaching staff would agree. After Monday’s practice and Vanderbilt’s fifth day of fall camp, Vanderbilt offensive coordinator Tim Beck talked about his assessment of Curtis’ learning of the offense.

“He’s doing a really good job of spending plenty of time in the film room and learning. He’s learning new stuff every single day. We got to remember that anytime you go from one program to the next, whether it’s from high school to college or college to college, there’s going to be a learning curve there,” Beck said.

Curtis’ arm talent and what he can bring production-wise onto a football field has never been questioned. The talent spoke for itself in his high school film. Now, the biggest key is understanding the offense and executing it.

The fact that Beck likes what he sees out of Curtis thus far at the very least shows that Curtis has progressed in his early development and understanding of college football. Along those same lines, though, it will continue to take time for his understanding of schematics to maximize and grow.

How long exactly? Beck said the time it takes for a player to truly understand an offense varies from player to player.

“It depends on what kind of system they came from and what they’re doing. It all depends on the specific individual on how fast they can pick things up and how fast they can move forward,” Beck said.

Curtis’ situation is an interesting one. The offense he is now learning at Vanderbilt is nothing like the offense he ran in his high school days at Nashville Christian. Just about everything Vanderbilt runs except for some types of routes are foreign compared to Nashville Christian’s.

And even then, the route names are noted as different names, so Curtis is truly going through the process of learning a college offense seemingly from scratch almost as if it is learning a new language.

“It’s completely different. You start off with just formations, the formations are going to be different. The motions are going to be different. The play calls are going to be different. So, everything’s different,” Beck said. “There’s some carryover on certain routes, but that route might be different than what they called them in high school. There’s just a lot to learn when you’re talking about all that.”

Regardless, it seems Curtis is making strides and has created results from his film study and playbook learning based on what Beck told reporters.

Learning and improving on the knowledge of the playbook and how the offense works is a common theme among players on Vanderbilt’s offense. The Commodores have a couple new faces in position rooms all around the offense, so building chemistry and each guy knowing where he has to go is a critical part of camp.

Waiting for the offense to reach its potential in terms of chemistry and playing with one another is going to take some time. But through five days of camp, Beck likes where Curtis and the rest of the offense is at.

“Really happy with the effort that we’re giving. They’re fighting through some things and we’re playing pretty fast for right now. We just got to remember we got a lot of new players and new faces on offense so it’s going to take a little bit of time to gel, but we’re on the right track,” Beck said.

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