Diego Pavia Appears to Be Done Talking. Time For Him To Get to Work.

Nashville—With 12 days until Vanderbilt football’s season opener, Diego Pavia has done his talking and is ready to prove it. 

The Vanderbilt quarterback—who has galvanized Vanderbilt’s roster with his declarations and leadership—was oddly pedestrian as he took the podium at Vanderbilt’s Monday media day. IT was almost as if he received a memo to slow his role prior to taking his seat at Vanderbilt’s table on the second floor of its McGugin Center.

Pavia taking the podium is never boring and will always provide a few “fireworks”—which he says he believes Vanderbilt’s offense will do once the season begins—but on Monday he sounded more like an NFL veteran trying to provide necessary information, promote his teammates and stay out of the headlines. Pavia said Monday that when football eventually stops being a possibility for him that he’d like to coach at some point. 

In that way his supposed deliberateness as he took the podium next to Vanderbilt defensive lineman Yilanan Ouatarra was on brand.

Could he see himself being painted as a villain? Is he embracing that? 

“I’m just ready to play football,” Pavia said. “I think we start here on August 30. It is, but I know we're really excited as a team to go out and compete, but we've been working towards this and we obviously have some big goals set in front of us.”

Does the outside noise fuel you? Does rejecting public unbelief motivate you? 

“I feel like I’m just a born winner,” Pavia said. “When it comes to thin margins I think last year we were as close to 10-2 as we were 2-10 so those thin margins are just where we need to win and we’ll be just fine.”

Pavia enters his second season at Vanderbilt’s quarterback and is coming off of a summer in which he commanded the room like nearly no other at SEC Media Days as a result of his crowd and what he said there. 

Those days Pavia declared that he wanted to win a national championship, that he would play on a torn ACL and that any NFL team who wanted to win would be smart to select him, he was as tame and perhaps as he’s been in a media setting since the end of last season. 

Perhaps that’s Pavia putting out good tape in press conference settings for NFL teams, perhaps it’s got something to do with the questions he received. Perhaps it because it’s almost go time, though. 

Every overarching story with Pavia at the center has been written at this point. Every question asked about him has likely been asked already. There hasn’t been an offseason storyline left untouched, there’s been plenty created. It’s almost a tired story at this point, if that’s possible with a player and person as dynamic as Pavia. 

Now it’s time for Pavia to write the second chapter of his story at Vanderbilt. It’s time for him to be as loud on the field as he was throughout the offseason. It’s time for him to look to do everything he can in order to continue to put himself at college football’s forefront. 

Pavia did that plenty this offseason with his words. Now he wants to do it by playing deep into the season. How’s he going to get there? His teammates, he says as if he believes it but demonstrated some restraint by doing so. 

“It starts off with your defense,” Pavia said. “Defense wins games, offense sells tickets. I believe that we have the defense to go do it and then second off, we have too much firepower on offense. I’ve talked to the guys and we just have so much belief in ourselves. That’s all it takes is just belief in ourselves.”