An unknown named Nate Glantz was going to be New Mexico State’s next quarterback. Aggies head coach Jerry Kill and offensive coordinator Tim Beck had already agreed.
They were so sure, they had called Iowa Western Community College head coach Scott Strohmeier to inform him prior to the 2021 National Junior College Athletic Association Division I championship game three years ago.
“We’re not going to interrupt your preparation for the game,” Beck told Strohmeier. “We’re going to offer him the day after the game.”
Glantz was their guy. It was settled. Kill and Beck had posted up at a Hooters that afternoon to celebrate their decision and watch the game. Besides greasy fingers from the wings, they also came out transformed. The quarterback for the winning team that day, New Mexico Military Institute, changed their minds.
Then Diego Pavia changed the course of his career.
He’s done that a lot. The toast of Vanderbilt, Nashville and, really, college football this week continues to raise the question: What did we all miss about him?
The Commodores quarterback looked like he physically and mentally willed Vanderbilt to the upset of No. 1 Alabama on Saturday that now qualifies as one of the biggest in history. It happened because a 5-foot-11, zero-star prospect from Volcano Vista High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a two-time state champion wrestler with next to zero offers, made it happen.
The result also backed up what happened after that afternoon at Hooters.
“As we’re watching the game and we’re looking at each other … we say, ‘We’re recruiting the wrong guy,'” Beck recalled.
Afterward, Strohmeier was informed that his quarterback was no longer in New Mexico State’s plans.
Glantz is now at FCS Lindenwood. By Monday afternoon, Pavia found his NIL marketing agent, 24-year-old high school bud Adrian Tenori, on Twitter cold-calling, or cold-tweeting, for NIL deals from any interested parties. Tenori even left his phone number on the platform.
“We have a lot of companies reaching out,” Tenori said Tuesday. “It’s not about the money, but you’ve got to consider what Diego’s done. We’re going over these contracts with attorneys.”
What Pavia has done is go from getting free IV drips (via NIL) in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to becoming a national celebrity at least for now. The nation is falling in love with the guy who looks like he could be your next-door neighbor.
“Sometimes guys slip through the cracks,” said Beck, a lifer at the lower levels of college football before becoming Vanderbilt’s offensive coordinator. “The quarterback position is such a unique position. There’s so many stories about Tom Brady not starting until he was a senior in college. …
“When you evaluate a quarterback, when you find a guy who is different and can lead people, that has a lot of value.”
The evaluation of this overlooked overachiever starts with this question: How tall is Pavia?
“No comment,” Joe Fortchner said.
Then the former New Mexico Military Institute head coach laughed.
“He’s probably 5-10, 5-11,” Fortchner said. “He swears he’s 6-foot, but he’s not.”
The media guide these days says 6-foot, 207 pounds. The road it took Pavia to get to Vanderbilt tells another tale. Fortchner had Pavia for his freshman season at NMMI in 2020. The isolated campus in Roswell, New Mexico, is referred to as “Nimmy” or “The Grindhouse” by the regulars. By all accounts, the school is your typical junior college military academy, full of discipline all the time.
“Get up for formation at 5 every morning, ready to go with your uniform on,” said Tenori, who played with Pavia at NMMI. “March to breakfast and go about your day. They don’t call it The Grindhouse for no reason.
“It’s unexplainable. Go to bed, wake up, make your bed, go to practice, go to school. I guess you’d say the perfect lifestyle, right?”
In that first season, Pavia was part of a three-man rotation during a 5-4 season that was played entirely in Texas because of COVID-19 restrictions. Fortchner stepped down after that season when his wife was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Shelby Fortchner recovered and remains the Broncos’ volleyball coach.
Under new coach and former Broncos defensive coordinator Kurt Taufa’asau, Pavia developed into a dual threat with an attitude. In that championship season, Pavia had a 21-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio to go along with 658 rushing yards.
In 2021, the Broncos went 12-1, winning that national championship.
In that “Hooters Bowl” witnessed by Beck and Kill, NMMI won 31-13 with Pavia throwing for two scores and running for one.
“We knew the kid had a heart in him,” Taufa’asau said. “Obviously, he was overlooked throughout his high school recruiting process. He was overlooked because of his height and size and the position he was playing.”
That heart began to show through. Taufa’asau said Pavia came to NMMI as a walk-on who eventually earned a legislative scholarship that paid for 40% of his tuition.
“Really, he was a Taysom Hill to us,” said Taufa’asau, comparing Pavia to the former BYU quarterback. “Utility guy, backup tight end, backup slot receiver, running back and quarterback. He ultimately led us to the best season in school history.”
That season, Beck scouted Pavia in person during a playoff game against Northwest Mississippi.
“You talk about a football-playing machine,” Beck said. “This guy, that’s what he does. He wants the ball in his hands. He wants to be in the moment. He’s not afraid of anything. I’ve had some tough quarterbacks over the years, but he’s one tough cookie both physically and mentally.”
A funny thing happened on the way to New Mexico State. Pavia was being used as “a pawn” in recruiting, as Taufa’asau described it, to land more valuable teammate Anthony Grant. The package deal never happened. Grant ended up at Nebraska.
Even Pavia’s hometown school, the state flagship — New Mexico — never showed any interest.
“I think that had a huge role in what he was trying to do to continue to prove people wrong,” Taufa’asau said. “No one wanted to take a chance on him. I was trying to push his name out there.”
Pavia’s frustration with that perceived snub surfaced last year when film emerged of the quarterback appearing to urinate at midfield on the Lobos’ logo in their indoor facility.
“When he peed in the indoor?” Fortchner asked. “He’s from there. He’s from Albuquerque. He would have been playing 10 minutes from his house. It was kind of insulting, really. Just the complete lack of interest. They weren’t even recruiting him as a walk-on.”
As impressed as Beck was, he still wasn’t completely sold in 2022 when Pavia arrived at New Mexico State.
“He struggled in the beginning. He had an injury I didn’t know about. He kind of kept that to himself. We went back and forth … No one really wanted to take the job,” Beck said.
“It was a hard evaluation when your offensive line is trying to block Minnesota and Wisconsin and Missouri. It’s hard to get a good evaluation on the quarterback. It came to a point where I thought he had something different.”
After starting the 2022 season 1-5, the Aggies won won six of their last seven and made only their second bowl since 1960. Last season, New Mexico State won 10 for the first time in 60 years.
Left behind was a New Mexico State program, the victim of its own success. Of the 117 players on the 2023 roster, 50 transferred. Beck was lured to Vanderbilt. Kill followed a few weeks later, tired of the fundraising, NIL, and roster-retention time. Kill landed a job as chief consultant to the head coach and offensive advisor.
Pavia, who was silently committed to Nevada for the 2024 season, flipped to Vanderbilt.
“The way Tim described Diego to us, as far as him and his character and his intangibles that he brought to the team, really made it to where it was a no-brainer to add him regardless of what the tape looked like,” said Vanderbilt general manager Barton Simmons. “He was super productive. But what he’d really done is he’d willed his team to level up. We weren’t going to turn down bringing that type of competitor into that building.
Now Nashville and Vandy are two-stepping their way to the center of college football because of the new Uncle Rico. Try to find a player anywhere who has won a JUCO national championship, an Iron Bowl — beating Alabama and Auburn twice in 11 months counts — been part of a 10-win season, and become a bowl game MVP.
There were signs this was coming. The Commodores beat Virginia Tech in Week 1 with Pavia running for 100 yards and averaging 12 yards per pass. Vanderbilt probably should have beaten Missouri but lost in overtime.
The Commodores continue to maintain that what happened against Alabama was expected. Maybe, but Pavia’s reaction betrayed that assertion. He used an f-bomb on national TV.
“It’s all about hype nowadays and I don’t like it like that,” Pavia said during the same interview.
Certainly not with his bro NIL agent chasing offers on Twitter. The quarterback reportedly had 70 family members in the stands. They gathered afterward at Barstool, a trendy spot in Nashville on Broadway.
What did we miss that night?
“He’s disciplined,” Tenori said. “He doesn’t drink. We went out after the game, and he didn’t have a lick of alcohol. He was different.”
“The vibes were just immaculate from the tailgate to the game, to getting on the field, to hanging out with the team after,” Tenori added. “Everything just went as perfectly as something could have gone that day.”
What did football miss to this point?
“People wanted to find out if he was the real deal,” Taufa’asau said. “Obviously, Alabama did this weekend.”
