Diego Pavia Bluntly Addresses His Height After Senior Bowl Measurements Go Viral – Sports Illustrated

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If football is a game of inches, so too, apparently, is a quarterback’s height.
Vanderbilt star Diego Pavia recently made headlines again after his Senior Bowl measurements fell short—literally—of his height listed in his official Vandy bio. Pavia came in at 5’9’’ 7/8, while his bio claimed he was 6’0’’ tall.
College football fans were quick to point out the two-inch-plus difference, though many may have already assumed Pavia wasn’t being completely truthful about his height (see how he compares to his peers in his Heisman Ceremony photos).
Pavia personally responded to critics on Monday at the Senior Bowl in which he brushed off concerns about his height making life tougher for him in the pros.
“Yeah, my size has been doubted my whole life,” Pavia said, via AL.com’s Creg Stephenson. “I feel like the only thing the NFL cares about is can you win, and I view myself as a winner. I’ve been fortunate with all these great teams that I’ve had—we’ve never had a losing season. So that’s something to look forward to, I hope, for the rest of my career, that’s how it’s going to be.
“I feel like God has blessed me in so many ways to be a connector, and I feel like that’s one of my superpowers that I’ve got—I can connect. We unite, and then once you unite, you want to play for one another, and once you give 120% effort, there’s no one that can stop your team.”
In his final year at Vanderbilt in 2025, Pavia recorded 3,539 yards and 29 touchdowns as he led the Commodores to a historic 10-win season but fell shy of a College Football Playoff berth. The Heisman runner-up is considered one of the more harder-to-predict prospects heading into May’s draft, with some analysts projecting him as a late-round pick or even an undrafted free agent. And, though he may not outright admit it, his height isn’t doing him any favors.
Over the last 30-plus years in the NFL, Arizona's Kyler Murray and Carolina’s Bryce Young have the shortest recorded official heights of a starting quarterback. Both Murray and Young measure in at 5’10” 1/8, and even now they arguably continue to go through growing pains on their respective teams.
With Pavia’s height, older age and polarizing off-field behavior potentially all being weighed by intrigued teams in the 2026 NFL draft, it’ll be very interesting to see where the Vanderbilt star ends up in the future.
Kristen Wong is a staff writer on the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. She has been a sports journalist since 2020. Before joining SI in November 2023, Wong covered four NFL teams as an associate editor with the FanSided NFL Network and worked as a staff writer for the brand’s flagship site. Outside of work, she has dreams of running her own sporty dive bar.
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