It’s fitting that Halloween falls during Vanderbilt-Auburn Week, because Tigers head coach Hugh Freeze is about to get his third straight visit from the nightmare that is Diego Pavia.
Across a total of four schools and two time zones, Pavia, now the Commodores’ quarterback, has haunted, hassled and harassed Freeze. This weekend, the two will meet for the third straight year as Vanderbilt travels to the Plains. It’s not a matchup anyone would have circled prior to the season, but it’s a game both teams desperately need, for very different reasons.
Vanderbilt and Auburn are, at this point, literal mirror images of one another. The Commodores are 5-3, the Tigers 3-5. Vanderbilt is a historical doormat experiencing success unprecedented in the modern era; Auburn is a past national champion that’s spent a decade flailing in search of answers. Vanderbilt beat Alabama; Auburn is on a three-game Iron Bowl losing streak. Oh, and while Auburn is still searching for answers at quarterback. Vanderbilt has found a generational one in Pavia.
“I’m sick of seeing that quarterback,” Freeze joked earlier this week. “I’ve had enough of him.”
You can understand why. In 2022, Pavia and New Mexico State pounded Freeze’s Liberty squad 49-14. All Pavia did was pass for three touchdowns and run for three more, throwing for 214 yards and rushing for 125. As jarring as that was, the next year was even more shocking.
Freeze jumped from Liberty to Auburn before the 2023 season. Late in the year, Pavia’s Aggies stormed into Auburn and proceeded to skull-drag the Tigers by a score of 31-10. Pavia threw for “only” three touchdowns and rushed for “only” 35 yards.
“Last year when we played (Pavia), the first time we touched the ball in the first quarter, I believe, was with 5:05 left,” Freeze said. “That’s uncomfortable. … He moves and makes plays and is savvy and smart and tough and, again, makes everybody do their assignment on every single play or you get burned. It’s three yards here, even on a broken play, and it’s four yards, and it’s third and three and they get three and a half.”
So if you’re keeping track, Pavia has hung two victories, nine touchdowns and an aggregate score of 80-24 on Freeze-led squads. Yeah, we’d be pretty sick of him too.
Pavia entered the transfer portal at the end of last season. When former New Mexico State head coach Jerry Kill joined the Vanderbilt staff as a consultant, Pavia decided his future lay in Nashville too, and jumped to the ‘Dores. The move has paid off immensely; Pavia was utterly untouchable in Vandy’s upset victory over Alabama, and Texas struggled to put him and the Commodores away last week.
“What a competitor he is and the job that (head coach) Clark Lea and his staff have done there,” Freeze said. “To be in the games and have a chance to win all of the games they’re playing against the nation’s elite is so impressive.”
With two conference losses in a crowded SEC, Vanderbilt is likely on the outside looking in at a playoff berth. But the fact that the Commodores aren’t on the bottom looking up is a massive improvement, and the improvisational genius and unpredictability of Pavia has helped burnish Vanderbilt’s once-irrelevant reputation. After that Alabama win, nobody’s taking the Commodores for granted this year.
Would that the same held true for Auburn. Under Freeze, the team has struggled immensely, unable to find any kind of identity on either side of the ball. Before last week’s win over Kentucky, Auburn had lost four straight SEC games, and the grumbling in the stands and suites at Jordan-Hare Stadium had begun.
Freeze can point to next year as a sign that better days are on the horizon; the Tigers have at the moment. (Caveat: They’re still behind three SEC teams — Alabama, LSU and Georgia — and Ohio State.) If Freeze is able to hang onto all those recruits, he’ll have a wealth of talent to begin climbing upward.
But he’ll have to get past Vanderbilt first. And if Pavia is able to notch a third straight win on Freeze, his nightmare is going to last a whole lot longer than Saturday afternoon.
