Round up a little, and Diego Pavia might well be six feet tall, his generously listed height. Before he transferred to Vanderbilt, he played at New Mexico State, and before that at the New Mexico Military Institute, where he committed out of high school as a two-star recruit. If there was any hint of what was to come, of the wild self-belief required to lead an upset of the No. 1 team in the country, it was that Pavia arrived in Nashville with a suspiciously rich lore. See: the no-look pass he once threw because his helmet was on completely backwards; the in-state rivalry taken so far it ended with an Albuquerque Journal story headlined “NMSU coach ‘disappointed’ in Diego Pavia after urination video”; the wrestling move he once tried on an Auburn defensive back, the only time I can remember a quarterback being called for unnecessary roughness. In that context and perhaps only in that context, Saturday’s Alabama-Vanderbilt game, a 40-35 Vandy win and maybe the biggest upset in SEC history, makes perfect sense.
Pavia had plenty of things to say after the win; unfortunately for the SEC Network standards and practices department, about 40 percent of it would need to be bleeped out later. (“Vandy, we’re fucking turnt!” he shouted into the mic, moments after explaining that God had given him a vision of this as a little kid.) In the stadium postgame, Vanderbilt looped a quote from Nick Saban over the PA. Two weeks ago on the Pat McAfee show, the former Alabama coach said, “The only place you play in the SEC that’s not hard to play is Vanderbilt.”
Saban came by that belief not unreasonably; at the very least, it never seemed very hard for him, or his teams. The last time Saban coached against Vanderbilt in Nashville, in 2017, the Crimson Tide won 59-0. Even if Vanderbilt had fallen short yesterday, if Alabama's Heisman contender Jalen Milroe had finished off the second-half comeback that seemed likely in the third quarter, the Commodores had already done in the first ten minutes of this game what they hadn’t managed to do in four games against Saban-era Alabama combined: score more than one touchdown.
Upsets of this nature tend to involve some mutual conspiracy: mistakes and sloppiness on one side; good luck and good field position on the other. How else does a team fresh off a statement win over Georgia get beat like this? Alabama did turn the ball over twice: Milroe threw a pick that linebacker Randon Fontenette returned for a touchdown, and he also took a sack and fumbled in Vanderbilt territory in the fourth quarter. But really, the Tide just got rolled. The Commodores never trailed, dominated time of possession—42 minutes to Alabama's 18—and punted only twice all game. In a must-stop situation, with their offense having scored a touchdown with just under three minutes to play, the Bama defense was helpless to get the ball back. Pavia and running back Sedrick Alexander picked up first downs with ease, and that was game.
“When you play at Vanderbilt, you have more fans there than they have,” Saban said in that Pat McAfee interview. Even so, there were enough Vanderbilt fans in the crowd to tear down the goalposts. They paraded them all the way to the Cumberland River, a two-and-a-half mile journey that they managed in a little over an hour. You'll have to forgive stadium security for the lapse. This wasn't something they'd planned for.
