NASHVILLE — The serape hangs on a hook behind the door in Jerry Kill’s office. It’s a memento but also a statement of sorts, about who Kill was and is and forever shall be.
Kill got off a bus outside Ford Field in Detroit on a frigid day after Christmas in 2022 wearing that gray-and-white serape, looking like a desert desperado arriving in town for a gun fight. His first New Mexico State team was playing in the Motor City Bowl, just its second bowl appearance in 62 years. The Aggies beat Bowling Green, 24–19, to finish 7–6, a massive accomplishment for what was justifiably labeled America’s worst FBS program for the previous half century. Kill got a massive tattoo of NMSU’s criss-crossed pistols logo on his right arm to commemorate the bowl win.
Next year, the entire team showed up for the season opener wearing serapes. It was an homage to New Mexican culture. It was a unifying movement. It was a fashion foreshadowing of what was to come that fall, as a punchline program turned serious.
The Aggies went 10–5, a football miracle equivalent to the loaves and fishes. The highlight was a three-touchdown beatdown of accomplished Southeastern Conference member Auburn, an almost incomprehensible upset romp by a 26-point underdog. It was New Mexico State’s best season since 1960, and second-best in history.
“We did things they may never do again,” Kill says sitting in his office, five feet from where the serape hangs. “It’s a tough-ass job.”
Jerry Kill is absolutely dropped out for this game. Aggies by 50! pic.twitter.com/j7CVlIX26G
— Sickos Committee (@SickosCommittee) December 26, 2022
A week after the season was over, Kill made like the High Plains Drifter and rode out of Las Cruces. He was the first coach to leave NMSU with a winning record since 1967. He relocated to a resort town in Mexico, Playa del Carmen, where he drank margaritas and tried to downshift into life after football.
Kill was 62 years old and had never had an easy job, somehow winning 62% of his games in stints at Saginaw Valley State, Emporia State, Southern Illinois, Northern Illinois and Minnesota. He was part of a remarkable generation of Kansas natives who launched coaching careers in that state in the 1980s—Dennis Franchione, Gary Patterson, Willie Fritz and Kill’s New Mexico State offensive coordinator, Tim Beck—with all of them having ties to Division II Pittsburg State. But Kill’s path through the profession was harder than others—there was a bout with cancer, and epileptic seizures that led to the end of his Minnesota tenure. After two seasons of scrounging for NIL money and fighting budget battles at New Mexico State, he was ready to reach the beach.
One day, a couple of margaritas in, the phone rang. An SEC coach was on the line with a job offer. He needed the old desert desperado to saddle up one more time. For an even harder gig.
Dressed in black, Clark Lea sinks into a chair in his office with a large mug of coffee to his left. His team is 3–0 and No. 20 in the nation, its highest ranking in 17 years. Coming off consecutive road blowouts of Virginia Tech and South Carolina, there is actually reason to appraise the Commodores as something they have never remotely resembled before: SEC championship contenders.
Two features of the room reflect characteristics of the 43-year-old Lea: A Peloton bike next to the desk underscores his rigorous adherence to fitness, and a wall of books testifies to his intellectual prowess and curiosity. He looks and talks like what he is—a former fullback with two degrees from Vanderbilt.
“He’s off-the-charts smart,” Kill says of Lea. “Every once in a while I tell him, ‘You got to talk a little bit of Kansas to me, boy, because I don’t understand a f—ing thing you’ve said.’ ”
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Lea’s pitch to Kill in the winter of 2023 was easy to comprehend: Help me fix this thing. Coming off a 2–10 debacle of a third year at Vandy that threatened to undermine Lea’s tenure, he conducted “somewhat of a purge,” clearing out several players and staffers.
He had to break the model he’d carefully constructed over three seasons. A new approach was needed, and one of the first elements of that was hiring Beck as Vandy’s offensive coordinator.
Lea had been fascinated by New Mexico State’s domination of Auburn. (“We beat the dog s— out of them,” says the bluntly irrepressible quarterback Diego Pavia.) Lea watched film of the game nine or 10 times start to finish, studying how the Aggies beat up on an SEC opponent that had superior talent. So before the Aggies played in the New Mexico Bowl, Lea had gone to Las Cruces and interviewed Beck for the OC position—with Kill sitting in on the interview.
“It was the only interview in the history of interviews where the head coach was in the room the entire time,” Lea recalls. “And then we all went to dinner together. It was a blast.”
Beck relocated to Nashville and brought some other NMSU assistants with him—running backs coach Ghaali Muhammad-Lankford, safeties coach Melvin Rice and quarterbacks coach Garrett Altman. But he also wanted his former boss along for this ride, so he pitched it to Lea, who called Kill on the beach.
“Your guys are great, but they say they want your ass here,” Kill recalls Lea saying. “So he started recruiting me and he was a pretty good recruiter.”
Lea pitched Kill on proximity to his granddaughter, who lives in Carbondale, Ill. He pitched Kill (and by extension Beck) on having broad control of the offense while he oversaw the defense. And he pitched Kill on being his head-coaching Yoda as needed.
“I’m at a point in my career where I want to be a really good head coach,” Lea says. “I want to do this well. I’ve learned from maybe not doing it well, and I don’t judge myself for that because it’s hard. It’s a hard job. But when you have someone with his experience and his wisdom, that can be an incredible resource. And I felt like he would be energized to be here. He could influence how this program functions.”
What Lea brought to the glitter of Nashville was the grit of Las Cruces. It was the accrued knowledge of two sidekicks in their 60s—one (Kill) who had been a college head coach for 24 seasons and another (Beck) who had been a college head coach for 10 and won a D-II national title at Pittsburg State. It was two lifetimes of winning at a place saddled with an eternity of losing.
As the chief consultant to the head coach and senior offensive adviser, Kill was empowered by a secure boss. Lea knew he needed help and wasn’t afraid to seek it from a proven head coach.
“Most of these head coaches are so goddamn arrogant that they ain’t going to ask anybody for help,” Kill says. “He’s completely different. He’s one of the best men I’ve ever been around.”
Kill’s first order of business was to scout his new team. He turned on film of a 2–10 team that lost its last 10 games and swallowed hard.
“Goddamn, we were bad,” Kill says. “I said to Beck, ‘What the f— have you got me into?’ ”
It looked bad, but change was on the way. The Las Cruces posse had one more member riding in from the range. The most important one.
Diego Pavia’s grandfather had a warning for his daughter, Antoinette Padilla, about her three sons as they were growing up: “Watch out for those boys. They’re not scared of anything.”
Pavia relates this from a Vanderbilt football meeting room, having bounced in like he owns the place. Fearlessness has brought him to this improbable landing spot, but not without a few foibles. With a side glance and an air of hard-earned wisdom, he adds, “There’s good and bad to not being scared.”
The good: Lacking fear meant competing in every sport as if losing was impossible. The bad: It also meant not backing down from confrontations in their hometown of Albuquerque. Padilla worked hard to provide for her three sons and a daughter, but there were hot embers glowing within.
“We’d always be freaking fighting and stuff like that,” says Diego, youngest of the boys and older than his sister. “My one brother did some fighting on the streets, and it was like these big dudes that he was just knocking out left and right. It was just like, Oh s—, we all got it.”
Friends and coaches told Diego he needed to channel his competitive spirit into wrestling at Volcano Vista High School. He preferred playing quarterback, despite being told repeatedly that he was too short.
Pavia received zero D-I scholarship offers. That included the downtrodden hometown program he wanted to play for, New Mexico, which reportedly rejected him for excessive cockiness. He wound up at New Mexico Military Institute, a junior college in Roswell that played its home games in the Wool Bowl. In his second season at the school, Pavia led NMMI to the juco national championship game against Iowa Western.
The game was played Dec. 17, 2021, in Little Rock. In Las Cruces, new Aggies coach Kill and his OC, Beck, went to the local Hooters to watch it. They were recruiting Iowa Western quarterback Nate Glantz, with plans to offer him a scholarship the day after the game. While watching Pavia pass and run NMMI to the title, they came to a realization.
“We were recruiting the wrong quarterback,” Beck says.
The Aggies switched plans. Pavia said on the Monday after the championship, he came out of a workout and had a spate of missed calls from Kill. He called back and was offered a scholarship, which he accepted without even taking a visit to the school. A week later, he was on campus.
It was a pretty easy sell. Playing time was available, and New Mexico State plays New Mexico every year—an annual opportunity to show the hometown school what it could have had. “I hated the Lobos,” Pavia says. “I still hate the Lobos.”
(Pavia’s antipathy toward New Mexico became national news in the summer of 2022, when he snuck into the team’s indoor facility and was photographed urinating on the midfield logo. He faced internal discipline at NMSU and later apologized. Fearless boys sometimes do stupid things.)
In his first season at New Mexico State, Pavia started out splitting time with freshman Gavin Frakes. By the end of the season he had taken over the job, with a six-touchdown performance in an upset of Hugh Freeze–coached Liberty putting him on national radar.
In 2023, Pavia was the unstoppable engine of that 10-win team, producing nearly 3,900 yards of total offense and 35 touchdowns. When Beck left and Kill retired, Pavia hit the transfer portal and had many suitors—he’d come a long way from the kid who couldn’t get a D-I scholarship out of Volcano Vista.
Pavia committed to Nevada. But that same day, Kill called him with some news—he was going to Vanderbilt and expected his quarterback to be there. Pavia switched course on the spot.
Kill and Beck knew what Vandy was getting in Pavia. But Lea had to feel it, too. It didn’t take long.
“The first time I talked to Diego, I realized he’s exactly what we need,” Lea says. “I mean, I work in football; I hear kind of over-the-top hubris all the time, right? But there’s a sincerity to him. There’s an honesty to him.
“Before we hung up the phone, he said, ‘Coach, I look forward to coming to Vanderbilt and helping you win championships.’ And it was one of the first times in my time here that I wasn’t having to convince someone of something. That had defined the first three years here, when I was like, ‘Please believe me that we can get this done.’ I had someone telling me that we were going to get it done, and that lit me on fire.”
It might have been an easy decision for the Las Cruces posse, but not an easy path. From Conference USA to the SEC? From an outpost in the corner of the state on I-10 to a major city that is constantly expanding? From a nuts-and-bolts state school to an academically elite private university on Nashville’s tony West End Avenue?
It is a testament to the depth of feeling and faith between Kill and Pavia that neither would have made this move to such a foreign place without the other.
“That guy’s like my dad, for real,” Pavia says. “He’s just looked out for me, cared for me when no one did. Dude, that guy’s great.”
Says Kill: “The best way to say it is, we took a chance on him and he never has forgotten it. He’ll text me out in the blue moon and say, ‘Hey, I love you, Coach.’ And he ain’t scared of f—ing nothing. Neither am I. We don’t give a s—.”
Pavia had a ton of academic work to do just to get into Vanderbilt as a grad transfer, needing to finish 23 hours of course credits to get his degree from New Mexico State. That kept him from participating in spring practice, but he was already in Nashville getting to know his new teammates and throwing sleepover parties for them.
A few other former NMSU players transferred in, most notably gifted tight end Eli Stowers, but Lea knew he had a galvanizing leader at quarterback. Historically timid, beatdown Vandy—the egghead intellectual outlier of the nasty SEC—needed some street-fighter edge, some swagger, some fearlessness. Pavia has all those things in larger quantities than someone 5′ 10″ and 207 pounds should reasonably be able to possess.
It all started pouring out in the season opener last year. New-look Vandy jumped on Virginia Tech in the first half and then held on for a 34–27 upset, with Pavia accounting for three touchdowns. Vandy’s 2–0 start became 2–2 with losses to Georgia State and Missouri, and the college football world resumed its Same Old Vandy stance.
Then Alabama came to Nashville.
“I ain’t scared,” Kill says he remarked to Pavia before the game. “You scared, Diego?”
More than 300 yards of total offense later, Pavia had led the Commodores to a shocking, 40–35 upset of the Crimson Tide that spurred a field storming and a deconstruction of the goal posts. (Kill has a plaque with a chunk of the post in his office.) A month later, Pavia beat Freeze again—the third straight time at two different schools—and Vandy was bowl-bound for the first time since 2018 and reached seven wins for the first time since ’13.
Pavia had more than 3,000 total yards and 28 total touchdowns in 2024, leading all SEC quarterbacks in rushing yards with 801. But perhaps most importantly, he had just six turnovers in 490 runs and passes—four interceptions and two fumbles—an average of one per 81.7 touches. That was a far lower rate than any other returning starting quarterback in the conference.
That was Pavia’s fifth season of college football—two in junior college, two at New Mexico State and one at Vandy. But he successfully mounted a legal challenge to the NCAA’s counting of junior-college seasons as part of its eligibility counter and was granted a sixth year.
While the legal maneuvering goes on, Pavia is back for another season. After what he did last year, Vandy had its most celebrated football player ever, drawing a huge crowd at SEC media days in July.
Pavia was on-brand there—wearing a bowtie and Louis Vuitton sneakers, and saying that he plays “balls to the wall every single play.” He also declared that the Commodores can win the national championship—perhaps the first time that statement had ever been uttered out loud at a major media function. He was the second coming of Johnny Manziel, with all the confidence but more charisma. His second year in the conference was going to be a show.
“I just wanted to come back to prove that, one, we’re going to win the national championship,” Pavia says. “And two, that I can play in the NFL. … I tell the scouts that I talk to, ‘You want to win the Super Bowl? Come get me.’ ”
Pavia’s pass efficiency rating is up so far, from 143.51 last year to 181.29 this year—good for 15th nationally. He hasn’t yet been as much of a factor running the ball, probably because Vandy hasn’t needed him for that while wearing down and beating up opponents in the second half. In an SEC season that began with massive Arch Manning hype, the best QB in the league might be the guy who came out of high school with zero D-I offers.
Vandy appears to be significantly improved even from last year’s breakthrough, but the proof will have to come in October and November against a gauntlet of No. 14 Alabama, No. 3 LSU, No. 23 Missouri, No. 8 Texas, No. 22 Auburn, Kentucky and No. 15 Tennessee. That’s life in the SEC.
But it’s a different SEC life today for Vanderbilt, which for time immemorial was checked off as an automatic win by opposing fan bases. The rough-around-the-edges Las Cruces posse has changed the outlook, injecting edge and attitude into a program that had been too prim and proper for its own gridiron good.
Kill’s desk is a portrait of a coach existing in the belly of the season. A two-thirds full Diet Coke bottle without the cap screwed on sits next to a packet of papers labeled “Base 1st and 2nd Down.” There is a $5 bill and a couple of singles, and a to-do list on a notepad. There is a daily pill organizer, which hints that his health struggles are not completely behind him.
Still, Kill says he’s in his best shape “in ages.” He’s been on a weightlifting regimen for five months. Lunch on Tuesday was a couple cups of yogurt.
If he thought about retiring again after last season, Pavia vetoed it by coming back. “You can’t leave here until I’m done,” the quarterback told his coach.
There are at least nine games to go, and perhaps new heights for Vanderbilt to reach. On its office hook, the old desert desperado’s serape is within reach—a symbol of football miracles that have been worked before, and might be in the works again.
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