Diego Pavia Takes Vanderbilt Football To Place It's Never Been at Heisman Ceremonies

The backdrop standing behind Diego Pavia as he took the chair and addressed the mob of media members that surrounded him on Friday afternoon was perhaps the most jarring piece of it all.

There it was, a gold sheet with a Vanderbilt logo and the Heisman Trophy on it. It wasn’t a joke or a misprint. This was for real, Vanderbilt belonged in this room.

In some ways it captivated it.

Diego Pavia's crowd was as big as anyone's on Heisman Trophy media day. | Vanderbilt football

Pavia wasn’t sitting alone waiting for anyone to take pity on him and ask a question. He was sitting there running the show in a room of college football’s best and most captivating performers.

The conversation ranged from Pavia’s source of extreme confidence, his inability to dance, his favorite Vanderbilt memories—which include a win over No. 1 Alabama and a senior day masterpiece against Kentucky—and his teammates, but it included an important correction of a stereotype regarding the program that he was there representing.

A reporter asked Pavia that former Miss State CB Fred Smoot once said of a Vandy WR, “if you do my homework, I'll let you catch a pass.” Perhaps Pavia’s response perfectly encapsulates the mentality that allowed this program to be in the building on Friday and to be represented on Saturday.

“We’ll do your homework and kick your a**,” Pavia said. “I feel that way. I feel like, you lined us up against anybody, and towards the end of the stretch, we were the hottest team. I felt like, and, you know, we wanted a chance to the CFP, but we just didn't do enough during the season to get it.”

Vanderbilt backed up Pavia’s Friday words—and strong preseason declarations—with a 10-2 season that put it on the College Football Playoff bubble and ultimately sent it to the ReliaQuest Bowl. Tennessee, LSU and South Carolina were in Vanderbilt’s path, but it didn’t have to bow down to traditional college football powers to get here.

Pavia won’t do that either on Saturday. The Vanderbilt quarterback--who is the first player in Vanderbilt's program history to be named a finalist for the award--is projected to finish second in the Heisman Trophy voting ahead of Ohio State quarterback Julian Sayin as well as Notre Dame running back Jeremiah Love. That order of finish wouldn’t have been possible in another era, but demonstrates that Vanderbilt isn’t to be counted out of anything in the NIL era. Pavia certainty believes that to be the case.

“Anyone can be good nowadays, as long as you got money,” Pavia said. “That's what it's come down to. And you see Lane Kiffin at LSU, he he wasn't about the money, but he made sure that he didn't have enough money to pay every single player.”

Vanderbilt has worked to stop short of becoming a transactional program, but it hasn’t shied away from players that are financially motivated. That’s benefitted it as it’s rebuilt largely through the transfer portal and has found itself in a position that it hasn’t been in prior to this season.

Pavia is a microcosm of the blueprint. He’s a former walk-on at New Mexico State that walked on at a Junior College at the beginning of his college career and had to win a quarterback competition at the beginning of his Vanderbilt career prior to becoming perhaps the most polarizing figure in college football.

Love him or hate him, he’s become the poster boy for what’s possible at for players of Hispanic culture and for undersized as well as underrecruited players in this sport. There he was representing all of those groups on Friday afternoon as he addressed the media in Manhattan.

Perhaps most importantly, he was representing Vanderbilt and the ideals that Commodores’ head coach Clark Lea once set out to prove were realistic. Turns out Lea was right, he just needed the right quarterback to prove it.

“It means a lot to the university, first off and then also to my teammates, Those guys work just as hard as I do,” Pavia said. “You guys know how people treat Vanderbilt because of the old ways, but you know that ain't nothing new to us, so we just got to keep grinding.”