Nate Bargatze tried recruiting Georgia’s five-star quarterback commit on national TV this weekend.
The comedian turned his College GameDay guest picker role into his personal recruiting platform Saturday, making multiple on-air pitches to Nashville native Jared Curtis to flip from the Bulldogs to Vanderbilt. Curtis, who is ranked as the No. 4 overall prospect and No. 1 quarterback in the 2026 class and has been committed to Georgia since May, was in attendance with ESPN’s traveling roadshow in his backyard.
When asked about it on Monday, Kirby Smart was dismissive.
“I don’t get caught up in it much,” the Georgia head coach said. “You know, I don’t look at the stuff like that. We recruit the best job we can and sell what we have and talk to the kids and communicate with the kids that we talk to, and trust them for what they tell us and not get into gimmicks and propaganda stuff.”
That’s about as close as Smart gets to saying “nice try, funny man” without actually saying it. Bargatze’s pitch — delivered twice during the GameDay broadcast — was cute TV.
“It’s hard for me not to remind Jared Curtis how much I would love for him to come to Vanderbilt,” he said while sitting between Pat McAfee and Kirk Herbstreit. “We’re both local kids, and we can become best friends, bud.”
And before anyone could get too excited about what a five-star QB attending a Vanderbilt game might mean, Curtis shut it down before the visit even happened.
“I’m just going there to watch the game with my coaches and a teammate who’s looking at Vanderbilt,” Curtis told Rivals ahead of the weekend. “It’ll be a fun time. At the end of the day, I’m still a Bulldog.”
That’s not to say Vanderbilt, led by Diego Pavia, hasn’t put in work with Curtis. The Commodores have been in communication with the five-star prospect, and having a Heisman candidate quarterback leading a resurgent program certainly doesn’t hurt their pitch. But there’s a difference between legitimate recruiting efforts and having a comedian make appeals on live television while the recruit watches from the stands.
At the end of the day, Georgia is still Georgia. Vanderbilt is having its best season in years at 7-1 and ranked ninth, which is legitimately impressive. But Curtis has already made his choice. Twice.
Bargatze’s GameDay moment made for fun television. But when it comes to landing elite quarterbacks, Smart knows Georgia doesn’t need celebrity endorsements to close the deal.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.