Diego Pavia Went Undrafted: The Heisman Runner-Up Snub Streak Snapped At 23 Years

For 23 years the math was reliable: finish second in the Heisman Trophy voting and an NFL team will spend a draft pick on you. Then the 2026 NFL Draft came and went across three days in Pittsburgh, and Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia — the 2025 Heisman runner-up — heard his name called by exactly nobody. With the final pick of the seventh round, No. 257, the books closed and Pavia was still on the board. He became the first Heisman Trophy runner-up to go undrafted since Iowa's Brad Banks in 2003, snapping one of the quietest streaks in the sport.

The second streak he broke is even longer-running in a different way. Pavia is also the first Heisman finalist of any kind — winner, runner-up, or invited finalist — to go undrafted since Northern Illinois quarterback Jordan Lynch in 2014. Lynch finished third in the 2013 Heisman voting, went unpicked, tried out with the Chicago Bears at running back, was cut before the season, and spent two years in the CFL with the Edmonton Eskimos before retiring. From 2014 through 2025, every single player who made it to the Heisman ceremony as a finalist was drafted. Pavia ended that run.

The résumé that earned him the finalist invitation was not the problem. Pavia finished the 2025 season as the SEC Offensive Player of the Year with 3,539 passing yards and 29 touchdowns through the air, plus 826 rushing yards and nine scores on the ground. In two seasons in Nashville he transformed a perennial SEC doormat into a 10-win team — Vanderbilt's first 10-win season in program history. In the Heisman voting on December 13, 2025, he collected 189 first-place votes and 1,435 points, finishing second behind Indiana's Fernando Mendoza, who totaled 2,362.

What made Pavia undraftable, in the league's collective judgment, was a single number: his height. At the NFL Scouting Combine he measured just over 5-foot-10 and weighed 207 pounds, making him the shortest quarterback at the combine and one of the shortest by height of any quarterback in the 21st century. Mendoza — who beat him for the trophy, won a national title, and went No. 1 overall to the Las Vegas Raiders — sat at the opposite end of the size spectrum. The 2025 Heisman race produced both the first pick of the 2026 draft and one of its most notable snubs.

Pavia's pre-draft process compounded the size concern. Reporting on his fall noted that his decision not to participate in several evaluation events worked against him during the runup, leaving scouts with fewer data points to offset the height question at a position where the league has grown only marginally more tolerant of sub-6-foot passers. The historical comps for short, dual-threat quarterbacks who succeeded — the Russell Wilsons and Kyler Murrays — cleared bars in testing, accuracy, or arm talent that the evaluation community decided Pavia had not definitively cleared.

The Banks comparison from 2003 is the cleaner historical echo. Banks, the Iowa quarterback, finished second to USC's Carson Palmer in the 2002 Heisman voting and then slid out of the draft entirely, eventually catching on as a late-round-caliber talent who never established himself as an NFL starter. For 23 years no runner-up repeated his fate — Heisman silver medalists went on to be first-rounders, Day 2 picks, and developmental Day 3 fliers, but they got picked. The streak's length is the story: an entire generation of college football passed between runner-up snubs.

The undrafted label did not end Pavia's NFL pursuit, only his draft-day standing. The Baltimore Ravens, who had originally extended a minicamp tryout invitation, opted instead to sign him to a full three-year contract as an undrafted free agent before camp opened in May. ESPN reported the deal, and the move gives Pavia a genuine, if uphill, path to a roster behind a quarterback room that includes the franchise's established starter. Undrafted Heisman finalists do occasionally stick — but they do it as projects, not as the high picks their college résumés once projected.

The broader lesson the 2026 draft delivered is the one the Heisman has always quietly carried: the trophy measures the best season in college football, not the best NFL projection. Pavia was, by the voters' count, the second-best player in the country in 2025. The NFL's 32 teams collectively decided that a 5-foot-10 frame outweighed a 10-win turnaround, an SEC Player of the Year award, and a Heisman ceremony invitation. Two streaks — 23 years for runner-ups, 12 drafts for finalists — ended on the same April weekend in Pittsburgh, and they ended for the same reason every short quarterback has heard his whole life.