Underdogs Diego Pavia, Vanderbilt look to maintain good instances rolling

It is so laborious for anybody to face out in Nashville as a result of everybody in Nashville is at all times making an attempt so laborious to face out.

All of these off-the-bus would-be nation music stars, performing in so many Broadway bars owned by so many precise stars, entertaining all these bachelorettes in pink cowboy hats and people dudes who seem like they’re attending a Luke Combs lookalike contest. Music City, USA is at all times a great time, but it surely additionally turns into very repetitive. This city aches for somebody to return alongside and eventually snap it out of its countless two-stepping loop. Say, a big-haired blond girl from Sevierville, Tennessee. Or a Man in Black on the prepare a-comin’ from Folsom. Maybe a woman from a Christmas tree farm in japanese Pennsylvania.

Or a Bama-beating water bug of a quarterback who rolled in off a desert wind that blew in from New Mexico.

“Straight out the dirt, son,” Diego Pavia says, the 24-year-old laughing as he sits up and slaps his hand on a gathering room desk in Vanderbilt soccer’s quarterbacks assembly room. “When I first got here, you would walk down to Broadway and everyone had on Alabama stuff or Georgia stuff or the bars would just have Tennessee flags out front. Now I see a lot of Vandy V’s out there. I think maybe people didn’t see that coming. Just like they didn’t see me coming.”

They see him now. We all do. One yr in the past, we noticed the 6-foot QB (nicely, that is how tall the Vanderbilt media information says he’s, however most everybody lists him at 5-10 … however, when a 5-10 sportswriter appears to be like him within the eye, he is perhaps 5-9 … however who cares as a result of he is additionally constructed like a BMW X4) lead the Commodores to this system’s first profitable season, first stint within the AP Top 25 and first bowl win for the reason that 2013 marketing campaign. On Oct. 5, 2024, we noticed him emulate his childhood hero, Johnny Manziel, by operating previous No. 1 Alabama, Vandy’s first win over the Tide in 40 years and first win over a top-5 staff ever, ending an 0-60 drought.

And in more moderen days, the world has seen Pavia at SEC media days and on Netflix, proclaiming that longtime lowly SEC cellar dweller Vandy is usually a nationwide title contender. And because the world entered final weekend, it did so dancing together with No. 2 in a music video that dropped for the track “Pavia Mafia,” as artist Axel Varela declared: “From the 505 to the world, baby!” and “Yo me enamoré del juego,” which interprets to “I fell in love with the game.”

What none of us noticed had been these days when that love affair started for Pavia. It was on the outskirts of Albuquerque, the place he grew up because the third of 4 youngsters, with two older brothers and a child sister. They had been raised by Antoinette Padilla, who discovered herself within the position of a single mom as Diego was changing into a teen and realized that her job as a entrance desk workplace employee wasn’t going to cowl the payments. She had grown up as certainly one of 14 siblings, additionally in a single-parent dwelling, and refused to place her children by means of that very same battle. So she enrolled in nursing faculty.

“I remember all of her books and papers spread out all over the kitchen table,” Pavia remembers. “She would cook dinner for us and we’d all eat and I’d see she hadn’t eaten anything. I’d ask her about it and she’d just say, ‘Oh, I’m not hungry.’ Now I realize that she was hungry, but that’s all we had. We were kids, so all we knew was that ‘we good, man.’ But now we know it’s because she was always sacrificing.”

Padilla was additionally at all times working. Once she started her profession as a long-term care nurse, she refused to be saddled with the loans she had taken out to pay for college. She studied home flipping and began shopping for fixer-uppers round Albuquerque. And who do you suppose did the fixing?

“We would work in the yards, paint, install new windows, all of it, as kids,” Pavia says with a bit of shake of his head. “She would rent them out, save up and then sell them. Then she started doing cars on the side. Buy a car cheap at auction, for like $2,000, fix it up and resell it for $6,000.”

So, if one had been to purchase a home with home windows put in or a automobile detailed by 13-year-old Diego Pavia, had been they going to be proud of the outcomes?

“I haven’t received any complaints yet, man.”

In their mom’s sizable wake, the three boys attacked each facet of their lives at full throttle, particularly when it got here to soccer and wrestling. Oldest brother Roel participated in each sports activities at Briar Cliff University, an NAIA faculty in Sioux City, Iowa. Just as Mom had proven Diego scramble out of debt, his brother confirmed him the advantages of attending faculty.

“As he got older, he developed into a rock,” Roel says. “He hit that growth spurt and it was all muscle. That’s when the older brothers stop picking on little brother because little brother can kick your ass.”

That development was within the shoulders and legs. It was not in peak. So, at the same time as Diego led the Volcano Vista Hawks to an ideal common season and the state semifinals, nobody in Division I faculty soccer gave the QB a severe look. But what damage probably the most was when the hometown New Mexico Lobos stated they had been passing not as a result of they thought he was too small, however as a result of he was too cocky.

“He still isn’t over that one,” Vandy soccer guide Jerry Kill says with amusing. “I don’t think he ever will be over that one. That’s always been part of his gasoline.”

Instead, Pavia settled for New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, the place he led his staff to the 2021 junior faculty nationwide title. That evening, his heroics for the Broncos had been being proven on native New Mexico tv. Bellied as much as the bar within the Las Cruces Hooters had been Kill and longtime mentee Tim Beck, the just-hired head coach and offensive coordinator at New Mexico State. They had been watching the sport to scout a quarterback — initially, Pavia’s opponent. But when the hearth hydrant taking part in QB for NMMI ran by means of Iowa Western for a 34-yard landing and an early 14-0 lead, Kill checked out Beck and stated, “Hell, man, we’ve been watching the wrong guy.”

That fallacious man grew to become the suitable man for the New Mexico State Aggies, as Pavia led the bottom-10 stalwart to a 7-6 report in 2022. The following yr, the Aggies went 10-5, this system’s first double-digit-win season in additional than six many years. Pavia most relished the Aggies’ win over New Mexico in Albuquerque, much more than their beautiful upset at Auburn. Unfortunately, he went viral after that Rio Grande Rivalry win when video surfaced of him urinating on the UNM emblem at its indoor observe facility. That incident got here up once more at season’s finish, when New Mexico State earned an invitation to the New Mexico Bowl, hosted by the Lobos, and the Aggies weren’t allowed to make use of that facility to arrange for the sport.

“That was embarrassing and inexcusable and no one knows that more than Diego Pavia,” Kill says. “But I also told you he was still mad about what happened coming out of high school.”

“We all make mistakes,” Pavia admits now.

When Kill retired following that magical 2022 season, Pavia practically made one other mistake, although on the time most believed his mistake to be the choice that he made, not the one he backed out on. Suddenly a scorching commodity on the daybreak of the NIL period, Pavia accepted an invitation and a pleasant payout to switch from New Mexico State to Nevada. Then his telephone rang. It was Kill, whose retirement had lasted all of some weeks.

“I went to Las Cruces to try and convince Tim Beck to come help us with our offense,” Clark Lea says of the journey he took in late fall 2023, simply as he had wrapped up his third season as head coach at Vanderbilt, his alma mater. It was a crushingly disappointing yr, the Commodores beginning 2-0 however ending 2-10. “Jerry sat in on some of our conversations and we all connected immediately.”

Soon Beck was headed to Nashville with a number of of his offensive gamers in tow. Kill tells the story that he was on the seaside in Mexico, three margaritas deep, when Beck and Lea lastly satisfied him to hitch them. Pavia tells the story that Kill then referred to as him and stated, “Don’t make a mistake and go to Nevada. I’m moving to Nashville and you’re coming with me.”

Pavia loves Kill and Beck a lot that he made the transfer with out hesitation, even leaving cash on the desk at Nevada. He additionally refused to go away Vandy after the storybook story of 2024, telling the “Bussin’ With The Boys” podcast that he had handed on a $4 million-plus NIL provide from an SEC rival to stay in Music City. What’s extra, he gained an injunction versus the NCAA for yet one more yr of eligibility, as an alternative of being penalized for time served on the junior faculty stage.

“I think that it is easy to see the guy who likes to talk a little and who likes to celebrate a lot and think, ‘Oh, he’s that guy,'” Lea says. “But look at what he has done to be here and stay here, and look at the 50 people who come from New Mexico to be with his family at our games. That’s someone who loves this place.

“Talk to our basketball workplace or [Vandy baseball head coach] Tim Corbin, and they’re going to let you know that Diego is of their workplaces, asking about what it takes to win. He has massive desires for himself, however he got here right here and all of these individuals come right here with him as a result of they adore it right here.”

Now, everyone else is coming, too, to be with the Pavia Mafia to watch college football at, of all places, Vanderbilt. Yes, he is most definitely prone to hyperbole, but Pavia’s observation about the gentle transfusion of black and gold into the college football identity of the bars along the Cumberland River is no exaggeration. It’s visible. As are the construction cranes that cover FirstBank Stadium, long the SEC’s time capsule of football venues, and the ground being broken to replace the team’s cramped subterranean 1990s football facilities.

All of that renovation was already on the books before Pavia arrived. But the kid who used to flip houses with his mother has injected that sweat equity investment mentality into Nashville’s business community and Vanderbilt’s alumni base.

Nashville is a city that has been constructed atop the idea of having a good time. Residents and visitors alike have never had a problem finding that good time everywhere from Tootsies to the Titans. Now, thanks to the QB that no one saw coming, they are discovering a good time at a place that has been hiding in plain sight since it hosted the state of Tennessee’s first college football game in 1890.

“Building stuff is enjoyable, man,” Pavia says. “It is not straightforward. But nothing price it’s ever straightforward. So when that work pays off, let’s get pleasure from it, Vandy. We earned it as a result of we constructed it.”

Straight out the dirt?

“Straight out the rattling grime.”