It was spring 2022 in the football offices at New Mexico State. New coaching staff, plenty of roster turnover, everyone still getting to know each other. One Friday, the new junior-college transfer quarterback walked into the offensive coordinator’s office accompanied by a police officer.
The quarterback stared at the floor as the cop told OC Tim Beck the news: Diego Pavia had been arrested.
“I was fuming,” Beck says. “We’re doing everything we can to get everybody headed in the right direction, and then I find out that our quarterback was arrested. He had his head down the whole time like he was ashamed.
“And then he finally starts laughing.”
The date was April 1. Pavia got a campus cop to go along on a whopper of an April Fool’s Day prank on his new coach.
It could be argued that Pavia has been pranking college football ever since. It’s the most captivating story in the sport, a miracle in two acts and two locations.
Undersized and unrecruited by Division I schools out of high school in Albuquerque, N.M., Pavia went to New Mexico Military Institute. Then he transferred to NMSU—the worst program in the country historically—linking up with Beck and head coach Jerry Kill.
With Pavia at QB, Kill and Beck led the Aggies to a 17–11 record across 2022 and ’23, the program’s best two-season stretch since the 1960s. They won 10 games the second season, including a romp past Auburn. (“We beat the dogs— out of them,” Pavia says.) When Beck was hired away by Vanderbilt coach Clark Lea, he pulled Kill out of a brief retirement and Pavia out of the transfer portal to join him.
At Vandy, there have been more April Fool’s–level surprises. The Commodores, eternal doormat of the Southeastern Conference, have gone 12–6 with the Las Cruces connection. That includes a 5–0 start to this season, setting up what is merely the biggest game in Vanderbilt history Saturday at Alabama.
Pavia’s most audacious pigskin prank to date was last season against the Crimson Tide, when he led Vandy to a 40–35 upset win as 23-point underdogs. At tailgates and in living rooms nationwide, people changed channels to watch a surreal event unfold. In Nashville, goalposts were dismantled, ending up in the Cumberland River. New Bama coach Kalen DeBoer was immediately thrust onto the hot seat.
These kinds of things didn’t happen. Not to Alabama. Or to Vanderbilt.
A year later, it's clear that stunner was not a one-off from the Commodores. They won a bowl game for the first time since 2013 to finish 7–6, and have started this season by winning every game by 20 points or more. They are ranked No. 16 in the AP Poll, and certainly did their part in luring ESPN’s College GameDay centerpiece to Tuscaloosa, Ala. this weekend.
And Pavia, a 5'10" tough guy who was advised in high school to wrestle instead of trying to play quarterback, is one of the most unlikely Heisman Trophy candidates ever. He’s No. 8 nationally in pass efficiency (184.62), No. 5 in touchdown passes (13), No. 14 in total offense (301 yards per game) and No. 15 in yards per play (8.65).
And No. 1 in leadership.
“He’s the ultimate competitor,” Beck says. “He’s the best football player I’ve ever been around in my 40 years of coaching.
“He is not afraid of any situation. Some people think maybe he comes off a little bit overconfident and brash, but the bottom line is he believes in himself. He’s got a chip on his shoulder, but he puts the work in behind it.”
The brashness? It’s there, and Pavia is either incapable of squelching it or unwilling to try. Last month, his message to NFL scouts was, “If you want to win the Super Bowl? Come get me.” This week, he’s not exactly tiptoeing into Tuscaloosa.
“I don’t know what they’re doing, I just focus on us, but I know we’ve got to bring it, that’s for sure," Pavia told On3. “The crowd, I think, is going to be a big factor in the game. But we just gotta play within the white lines. If we do that, if we play our game, it won’t be close.”
Vanderbilt had the undeniable luxury of catching an overconfident Alabama last year. The Crimson Tide was coming off a huge win over Georgia and were 4–0, bolstering belief that DeBoer was the perfect replacement for Nick Saban. Vandy laid a trap, and the Tide walked right into it.
That will not be the case this time around. Alabama is once again coming off a thrilling victory over Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs, but another letdown is unlikely. Revenge and a trash-talking quarterback are top of mind for the Tide.
So this is a “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” situation for the Albuquerque prankster. It’s up to Pavia and the Commodores to rise to the occasion. And this is the biggest football occasion they’ve ever had.
Consider the current terrain, then consider Vandy history.
The SEC, while extremely deep, enters October still taking auditions for its best team and top College Football Playoff contenders. There are five undefeated teams in the league, and none of those are the six that were ranked highest coming into the season—Texas, Georgia, Alabama and LSU all have a loss; South Carolina has two; Florida has three. The winner of Saturday’s game in Tuscaloosa arguably moves to the front of the class.
As for the history: neither of James Franklin’s successive nine-win Vandy teams in 2012 and ’13 started the season fast enough to generate much buzz. Most of their wins were accrued later in the year.
Last time the Dores started 5–0 was 2008, which included beating Auburn 14–13 in Nashville with GameDay on campus. That moved Vandy up to No. 13 in the AP poll, but it was followed by a defeat at unranked Mississippi State that started a four-game losing streak, taking the starch out of that season. Besides, the SEC in ’08 had already established terms of how that season would go, with Saban getting Alabama rolling in his second year and Florida on its way to winning the national championship.
Before that, you have to go back to 1943, when Vandy went 5–0 during a World War II-affected season in which the Commodores played no SEC games and only competed against in-state opponents. They also were 5–0 in ‘41, which might have been as promising as the current start.
That Vandy team rose to No. 10 in the rankings, but was thrashed by Tulane in its sixth game, 34–14. A Chattanooga Daily Times story from that game lauded the “swell effort” of Vanderbilt’s “light speed demons,” but said it could not match “the terrifying lash-back effort of enigmatic Tulane.”
That game was played five weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s been a while.
The last 6–0 Vanderbilt team? That was in 1928. So if the Commodores can somehow pull off the Bama Double—this time as a 10 1/2-point underdog—it essentially will be a once-a-century start.
The joke has been on a college football world that never took Diego Pavia seriously—until his play demanded it. Will the Albuquerque Prankster laugh last again on Saturday?
More College Football on Sports Illustrated
Listen to SI’s new college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Vanderbilt’s Hot Start Could Turn Historic If Diego Pavia Has the Last Laugh vs. Alabama.
