Remember when Diego Pavia wasn’t preseason All-SEC this year? Now, he’s representing the SEC in New York
Published:
I couldn’t find another example of it because, on the surface, it doesn’t make sense.
A quarterback who earns All-SEC honors at season’s end and then returns for another season is supposed to be a preseason All-SEC lock. The whole point of the preseason all-conference teams is to honor both the players who are most decorated from the previous season and the players who are poised to have the most success in that upcoming season. It’s often forgotten about because preseason honors are hardly the accomplishment of postseason honors.
But yeah, Diego Pavia has done the impossible. He’s gone from 2024 All-SEC quarterback to preseason All-SEC snub to … New York.
Just as we all predicted. Why not? Non-linear? I suppose. Pavia, along with Fernando Mendoza, Jeremiyah Love and Julian Sayin, are your 2025 Heisman Trophy finalists.
You could probably make a better case that Vanderbilt‘s brand bias worked against Pavia’s preseason All-SEC credentials than the team’s Playoff credentials, but those are separate conversations. After all, BYU, Notre Dame, Utah and Virginia also played Power Conference schedules and got left out of the Playoff. The preseason All-SEC discussion is far more egregious to look back on.
Your preseason All-SEC quarterbacks were:
- Garrett Nussmeier: First Team (Coaches), Second Team (Media)
- LaNorris Sellers: First Team (Media), Second Team (Coaches)
- DJ Lagway: Third Team (Coaches)
- Arch Manning: Third Team (Media)
That aged … poorly.
Hand up. I’m part of the problem.
In my defense, I at least explained how Pavia nearly earned the No. 3 spot on my preseason All-SEC ballot, and I gave the nod to Lagway instead because he was the better player in the latter half of the season. Also in my defense, I spent all offseason outlining how Pavia wasn’t the same guy after Deone Walker fell on his leg in the Kentucky game, and that if he returned to full strength with a team that was No. 8 in FBS in percentage of returning production, there was reason to believe that Pavia could actually take another step forward in 2025.
Did I think that step would be a direct path to New York? No chance.
Here’s the other irony. If you listen to The Saturday Down South Podcast (you should totally do that and subscribe here), you’ve heard me heap praise on Pavia consistently since he led Vandy to a win in that opener against Virginia Tech in 2024. You also heard me say after this year’s Texas game that Pavia, by virtue of being on a 2-loss Vandy team and having a limited statistical profile at the time, probably didn’t have a shot at the Heisman. Then all Pavia did was close the season with a 4-game stretch among the most prolific in SEC history.
Including the Texas game, wherein he nearly helped Vandy erase a 34-10 deficit in the 4th quarter, look at Pavia’s November numbers:
- 465.5 yards of offense/game (No. 1 in FBS)
- 373.5 passing yards/game (No. 1 in FBS)
- 24 20-yard passes (T-No. 1 in FBS)
- 10.8 yards/pass attempt (No. 1 among Power Conference QBs)
- 189.9 QB rating (No. 1 among Power Conference QBs)
- 9.1 yards/play (No. 1 among Power Conference QBs)
- 368 rushing yards (No. 1 among Power Conference QBs)
- 92 rushing yards/game (No. 1 among Power Conference QBs)
- 12 TD passes (T-No. 2 in FBS)
And Pavia did that while leading Vandy to its first 10-win season in school history. No big deal.
You’ll hear about all of this as Pavia is in New York getting the full Heisman treatment. That’ll include some, um, interesting face time for his highly viewed family.
(Marty Smith sitting down with the Pavia family at the Heisman ceremony will be appointment viewing. If they get the Pavia brothers in that room … look out.)
Sure, there could be some Pavia fatigue by the end of this, especially if the cameras stick on his mom like they did during the final few games of the season.
But at the same time, there needs to be a deep appreciation of what he’s done to become an SEC legend
No matter how Saturday night plays out — I’ll be surprised if Pavia is anything worse than runner-up — that’s been established. If we can appreciate college football greats like the late Colt Brennan or Ashton Jeanty making their mark on the sport coming from non-Power Conference programs, why can’t we appreciate Pavia doing so against an SEC schedule?
You can roll your eyes that Pavia went on Bussin’ With The Boys and spoke about “running Tennessee” and winning a national championship. But what’s undeniable is that even if those offseason comments made your skin crawl, Pavia came much closer to living up to every lofty goal he set out on than you, me or anybody outside of Nashville thought was possible.
Shoot, there were people like Vanderbilt’s own Jordan Rodgers who didn’t even have Pavia as a top-10 quarterback in the SEC coming into this year.
“Do I think he’s gonna go out there and stink? Absolutely not. I do think he’s one of the hardest guys to game plan against,” Rodgers told SDS back in July. “But by merit of what we saw last year, they’re gonna run him a lot less, so I think his production is gonna be a little less, and they should because he was banged up at the end of last year, and he wasn’t playing like the same Diego because of that.”
I don’t circle back to that to dog someone like Rodgers, who’ll forget more about quarterback evaluation than I’ll ever know (he also was loudest about preseason Manning skepticism), but it’s one of those reminders that Pavia was still climbing uphill entering this encore season. If you had asked 100 people outside of that locker room if it was more likely that Pavia would be humbled in a 4-win season or that he’d be a Heisman finalist after a historic 10-win season, how many of them would’ve picked the latter? One? Two?
And even if they did, we’d all wonder if those were the same few unidentified media members who used to infamously fill out the preseason All-SEC ballot and jokingly pick Vanderbilt to win the SEC.
Who’s the joke now?
In a year in which seemingly every decorated preseason quarterback in the SEC fell on their face (again), Pavia and his 5-9 frame (that’s still my guess on his height) rose above the rest to be in the room with college football royalty. That doesn’t have to be a polarizing thing to discuss. It can just be an acknowledgement that you cannot tell the story of the 2025 season without Pavia. Period.
On Saturday night, a new Heisman will be enshrined. Maybe that’ll be Pavia, or maybe it’ll be Mendoza. Either way, it’s impossible to overstate how wrong so many of us were about Pavia.
Heisman or not, he got the last laugh.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
