‘Building stuff is fun, man’: How Diego Pavia helped Vanderbilt rise from its ruins

It is so hard for anyone to stand out in Nashville because everyone in Nashville is always trying so hard to stand out.

All of those off-the-bus would-be country music stars, performing in so many Broadway bars owned by so many actual stars, entertaining all those bachelorettes in pink cowboy hats and those dudes who look like they are attending a Luke Combs lookalike contest. Music City, USA is always a good time, but it also becomes very repetitive. This town aches for someone to come along and finally snap it out of its endless two-stepping loop. Say, a big-haired blond woman from Sevierville, Tennessee. Or a Man in Black on the train a-comin’ from Folsom. Maybe a girl from a Christmas tree farm in eastern 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 meeting room table in Vanderbilt football’s quarterbacks meeting 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 year ago, we saw the 6-foot QB (well, that’s how tall the Vanderbilt media guide says he is, but most everyone lists him at 5-10 … but, when a 5-10 sportswriter looks him in the eye, he might be 5-9 … but who cares because he’s also built like a BMW X4) lead the Commodores to the program’s first winning season, first stint in the AP Top 25 and first bowl win since the 2013 campaign. On Oct. 5, 2024, we saw him emulate his childhood hero, Johnny Manziel, by running past No. 1 Alabama, Vandy’s first win over the Tide in 40 years and first win over a top-5 team ever, ending an 0-60 drought.

And in more recent days, the world has seen Pavia at SEC media days and on Netflix, proclaiming that longtime lowly SEC cellar dweller Vandy can be a national title contender. And as the world entered last weekend, it did so dancing along with No. 2 in a music video that dropped for the song “Pavia Mafia,” as artist Axel Varela declared: “From the 505 to the world, baby!” and “Yo me enamoré del juego,” which translates to “I fell in love with the game.”

What none of us saw were those days when that love affair began for Pavia. It was on the outskirts of Albuquerque, where he grew up as the third of four children, with two older brothers and a kid sister. They were raised by Antoinette Padilla, who found herself in the role of a single mother as Diego was becoming a teenager and realized that her job as a front desk office worker wasn’t going to cover the bills. She had grown up as one of 14 siblings, also in a single-parent home, and refused to put her kids through that same struggle. So she enrolled in nursing school.

“I remember all of her books and papers spread out all over the kitchen table,” Pavia recalls. “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 also always working. Once she began her career as a long-term care nurse, she refused to be saddled with the loans she had taken out to pay for school. She studied house flipping and started buying fixer-uppers around Albuquerque. And who do you think did the fixing?

“We would work in the yards, paint, install new windows, all of it, as kids,” Pavia says with a little 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 were to buy a house with windows installed or a car detailed by 13-year-old Diego Pavia, were they going to be happy with the results?

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

In their mother’s sizable wake, the three boys attacked every aspect of their lives at full throttle, especially when it came to football and wrestling. Oldest brother Roel participated in both sports at Briar Cliff University, an NAIA school in Sioux City, Iowa. Just as Mom had shown Diego how to scramble out of debt, his brother showed him the benefits of attending college.

“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 growth was in the shoulders and legs. It was not in height. So, even as Diego led the Volcano Vista Hawks to a perfect regular season and the state semifinals, no one in Division I college football gave the QB a serious look. But what hurt the most was when the hometown New Mexico Lobos said they were passing not because they thought he was too small, but because he was too cocky.

“He still isn’t over that one,” Vandy football consultant Jerry Kill says with a laugh. “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, where he led his team to the 2021 junior college national title. That night, his heroics for the Broncos were being shown on local New Mexico television. Bellied up to the bar in the Las Cruces Hooters were Kill and longtime mentee Tim Beck, the just-hired head coach and offensive coordinator at New Mexico State. They were watching the game to scout a quarterback — initially, Pavia’s opponent. But when the fire hydrant playing QB for NMMI ran through Iowa Western for a 34-yard touchdown and an early 14-0 lead, Kill looked at Beck and said, “Hell, man, we’ve been watching the wrong guy.”

That wrong guy became the right guy for the New Mexico State Aggies, as Pavia led the bottom-10 stalwart to a 7-6 record in 2022. The following year, the Aggies went 10-5, the program’s first double-digit-win season in more than six decades. Pavia most relished the Aggies’ win over New Mexico in Albuquerque, even more than their stunning upset at Auburn. Unfortunately, he went viral after that Rio Grande Rivalry win when video surfaced of him urinating on the UNM logo at its indoor practice facility. That incident came up again at season’s end, when New Mexico State earned an invite to the New Mexico Bowl, hosted by the Lobos, and the Aggies weren’t allowed to use that facility to prepare for the game.

“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 nearly made another mistake, though at the time most believed his mistake to be the decision that he made, not the one he backed out on. Suddenly a hot commodity at the dawn of the NIL era, Pavia accepted an invite and a nice payout to transfer from New Mexico State to Nevada. Then his phone rang. It was Kill, whose retirement had lasted all of a few weeks.

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

Soon Beck was headed to Nashville with several of his offensive players in tow. Kill tells the story that he was on the beach in Mexico, three margaritas deep, when Beck and Lea finally convinced him to join them. Pavia tells the story that Kill then called him and said, “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 so much that he made the move without hesitation, even leaving money on the table at Nevada. He also refused to leave Vandy after the storybook tale of 2024, telling the “Bussin’ With The Boys” podcast that he had passed on a $4 million-plus NIL offer from an SEC rival to remain in Music City. What’s more, he won an injunction versus the NCAA for one more year of eligibility, instead of being penalized for time served at the junior college level.

“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 office or [Vandy baseball head coach] Tim Corbin, and they will tell you that Diego is in their offices, asking about what it takes to win. He has big dreams for himself, but he came here and all of those people come here with him because they love it 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 fun, man,” Pavia says. “It isn’t easy. But nothing worth it is ever easy. So when that work pays off, let’s enjoy it, Vandy. We earned it because we built it.”

Straight out the dirt?

“Straight out the damn dirt.”