Diego Pavia is headed to the Baltimore Ravens minicamp after going undrafted in the NFL Draft, a turn that caps one of college football’s strangest climbs and leaves him still trying to prove he belongs in the league.
Pavia, a 24-year-old quarterback, accepted the invite after a 2025 season in which he steered a Vanderbilt offense that led the nation with 7.5 yards per play and finished second to Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza for the Heisman Trophy. Vanderbilt had only one player drafted this year, tight end Eli Stowers, who went in the second round to the Philadelphia Eagles.
That outcome stood out for more than the award race. Since the 2010 season, 59 SEC teams have won at least 10 games and those teams averaged 6.8 players drafted, yet no SEC team with as few as one player drafted had been a 10-win team before Vanderbilt. Pavia led Clark Lea’s team and ran Tim Beck’s offense, but the draft told a different story: the league valued him as a free-agent invitation rather than a draft pick.
Some of the reasons were plain enough. Pavia was a zero-star recruit before his college career, and The Athletic analyst Dane Brugler ranked him as his No. 16 quarterback and outside his top 300 prospects. Brugler said he viewed Pavia as the kind of player who could be the “life of the party,” but also as “mediocre” from an NFL projection standpoint. His 5-foot-10 frame and average arm were cited as factors, along with the character concerns that followed him from earlier in his college career.
Those concerns reached back to when Pavia was 21 and at New Mexico State, when he urinated on the practice field of rival New Mexico. That episode, combined with his size and arm strength, appears to have weighed heavily against him even after a season that made him one of the sport’s most recognizable quarterbacks. The Ravens now get the chance to see whether the production that carried Vanderbilt can translate, and Pavia gets one more stage to answer the doubts that followed him into the draft.
For a player who rose from zero-star recruit to Heisman finalist, the next step is simple and unforgiving: make the minicamp count.