Good luck predicting Diego Pavia’s NFL future
By David Wasson
Published:
The mythmaking of Diego Pavia is my fault.
The mythmaking of Diego Pavia is your fault.
The mythmaking of Diego Pavia is everyone’s fault. And soon, it appears, it will be the big, bad National Football League’s turn to grasp the Pavia mythmaking wheel and direct it into the future.
It is hard to remember a more challenging-to-define player that emerged from the Southeastern Conference than the one and only Diego Husane Pavia. At 6-foot and 207 pounds – or 5-foot-9 7/8 inches and 198 pounds if you believe those Senior Bowl hacks with actual tape measures and scales – Pavia has captivated our eyeballs and imaginations for the better part of 2 seasons.
The erstwhile former Vanderbilt quarterback, a good head more diminutive than his fellow elite SEC signal callers, came out of absolutely nowhere – or New Mexico, if you want to be precise – to dazzle and deconstruct and otherwise confound opposing defenses during a breakout 2024 season with the Commodores.
And for an encore, while neither taller nor bulkier yet armed with a trusty preliminary injunction to deliver another run at the SEC, Pavia delivered to the Commodores the best sequel since Michael Corleone took over the family business in The Godfather II. Like Al Pacino’s 5-foot-6 Corleone, size didn’t matter week after week when Pavia dissected teams with a potent combination of grit and skill en route to a 10-3 record and a seat on the Heisman Trophy dais.
You’d think that throwing for almost 6,000 yards, rushing for almost 2,000 more, scoring 67 total touchdowns and winning 17 freaking ballgames at Vandy in those 2 magical seasons would slot Pavia somewhere in the first round of the impending NFL Draft.
Because what kind of talent must one possess to pile up those bodacious numbers? And surely said talent must be transferable to the next level?
Right?
Yet here we are, less than 2 months out from commissioner Roger Goodell beginning the first-round bro-hug parade in Pittsburgh, with Pavia – arguably the SEC’s single-best story during the Earth’s last 2 cycles around the Sun – barely being thought of at all.
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How is this possible?
For starters, as mentioned, there is the distance between the top of Pavia’s head and the soles of his feet. Not a lot of it there – not to mention over 2 inches less than Vandy generously gave him in print – and not a lot of it with which to successfully see over gigantic NFL linemen. Pavia stockholders would rebut that their man was plenty capable of seeing over and through Vanderbilt’s line, alas, but the NFL is filled with both college all-stars and grown-ass men who literally dwarf their man.
Said stockholders would also point out that Kyler Murray and Bryce Young are both all of 5-foot-10 and have made quite a tidy living in the league. So too did Doug Flutie, who was also all of 5-foot-10 and torched the CFL for many years before finding a second pro life in the NFL. And the shortest QB in modern NFL history, Eddie LaBaron, who was listed at 5-foot-9, played 11 seasons with Washington and the Dallas Cowboys from 1952 to 1963.
Still, size matters in this particular debate – and there is a reason that Murray and Young (the 5-foot-11 Russell Wilson doesn’t count…) are the only 2 starting sub-6-footers active at this moment.
And then there is the subject of Pavia’s theoretical maturity. Unlike height, one cannot objectively measure maturity (for which this author is grateful…). But much like how Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once defined obscenity by declaring “I know it when I see it,” the NFL seems to be discovering and defining Pavia’s relative maturity level every time he opens his mouth.
Even if one were to chalk up Pavia’s Heisman-night outburst on Instagram where he infamously uttered “F— all the voters” who voted for Indiana’s Fernando Medoza over him, the issue of maturity keeps being asked of the player who somehow thought it would be wise to choose Johnny Manziel as a mentor.
Just last week at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, Pavia was quizzed about his maturity by the media and offered this: “Yeah, [Vanderbilt] coach [Clark] Lea always preached that your frontal lobe isn’t fully developed until you’re 25. I just turned 24, so I got like 360 more days to go.”
Hand the keys to your franchise to that guy, right?!
Listen, if we had a dollar for every NFL prospect that wasn’t exactly Saban’s gift of maturity, we wouldn’t need to be writing this column. And to play football at the level that Pavia has already mastered, one needs to bring more than sandlot flair and savoir-faire.
Nevertheless, the top-line job description of professional quarterback demands quite a bit of finished product occupying the 4 inches between one’s earlobes. And Pavia, for all his unwitting honesty at the NFL Combine, apparently still has some frontal lobe to develop.
All this begs the essential question: What is Pavia’s NFL future? Will a prescient general manager become dazzled by Pavia’s game tape and ignore the noise? Or will all 32 teams – seeking substance over sizzle – ride the Pavia pass line all the way to undrafted free agency?
Either way, the Diego Pavia Experience has more chapters to be written, more episodes to record. It may be all of our faults that said mythmaking experience has gotten to the point where we must ask the above essential question, but how it actually gets answered is truly anyone’s guess.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
