Tight ends Cole Spence (16) and Eli Stowers (9) combined to catch eight passes for 88 yards in Vanderbilt's win over LSU. Steve Roberts / Imagn Images

One of college football's most successful general managers got his start covering recruiting in the media years ago. Barton Simmons, a former All-Ivy League safety at Yale, spent 15 years ranking high school prospects and building recruiting profiles for Rivals and 247Sports.

Then, in December 2021, he took a chance when his childhood friend Clark Lea, at the time the new head coach at Vanderbilt, offered Simmons a role as the Commodores' general manager.

Now, four years later, Simmons has engineered one of the sport's most impressive program overhauls thanks in large part to the insight he's gained about two major components of modern college football -- player evaluation and roster construction.

Vanderbilt, which went winless the year before Lea and Simmons arrived, enjoyed its first winning season in over a decade in 2024, and this year, the Commodores are off to a 6-1 start and ranked No. 10 in the Associated Press poll. Last Saturday, they beat LSU for the first time since 1990.

One of the keys to the turnaround, according to Simmons, has been understanding how critical a player's mindset is to his success.

"I don't think that's any revelation, but it really is everything," Simmons said. "The player that comes in with the willingness to persevere, with resilience and toughness, who loves football and will stay within the process, those guys are typically gonna become good players. And if they're also really talented, they're gonna become great players. And then, there's also a lot of guys with the mindset (that) doesn't match up with the ability, and that ultimately equates to a miss."

The transformative piece at Vanderbilt is 24-year-old quarterback Diego Pavia, a former zero-star recruit out of high school in New Mexico who went to junior college and then became a two-star prospect with one FBS offer, from New Mexico State. The SEC Newcomer of the Year in 2024, Pavia came to Vanderbilt after Lea hired two of his coaches at New Mexico State -- offensive coordinator Tim Beck and head coach Jerry Kill, who planned to retire after the 2023 season. Kill, who has a 175-115 record across six stops as a head coach, serves as the chief consultant to the head coach at Vanderbilt.

"Diego's been a pretty instructive case study," Simmons said. "Toughness and intangibles at that position are literally everything. It's just so easy to be seduced by everything else, but you just gotta have a guy at that position that your team can respond to.

"The first time I saw him was when Clark began to dig into the New Mexico State team. You saw this bulldog of a quarterback, the energy, the intensity and competitiveness that he plays with, but was that gonna translate to the SEC? That was the question. But this wasn't some genius scouting move. The coaching staff was coming, and what they communicated was this guy was going to totally capture the locker room with a team that was lacking that. It almost didn't matter what the play was gonna translate into. Just get the person in the building and let him loose."

On Tuesday, the school launched a campaign to promote Pavia for the Heisman Trophy. He ranked third behind Indiana's Fernando Mendoza and Alabama's Ty Simpson in The Athletic's most recent Heisman straw poll. Pavia leads the SEC in completion percentage at 70.5 and has thrown 15 touchdowns and just four interceptions. He also leads the Commodores with 438 yards rushing.

Simmons admits he didn't truly begin to grasp how good Pavia was until the 2024 opener against Virginia Tech, when the QB threw two touchdown passes and ran for 104 yards and scored the go-ahead TD in a 34-27 overtime win.

"He was our best quarterback in practice," Simmons said, "but when he's not live, you don't get a full appreciation for the magic. I think the thing he gets undersold on is, he's very accurate. His ball gets there on time with great ball placement. Everything inside of 50 yards, the ball gets there with velocity, too. He's got arm talent. He just can't throw it as far as some people.

"Dude, there is literally not a player in college football that I would trade for him. He's unbelievable."

Even with all that, Simmons said he understands why Pavia was such an afterthought in recruiting.

"The path has been what it needed to be for him," Simmons said. "If you're taking a quarterback, it's hard to take one that is 5-10 with an unorthodox throwing motion that is playing in New Mexico. That's a hard profile to have confidence in, but then again, the more you know him, the more conviction he brings.

"One of the great things about Diego is his delusion of how great he is and how great he can be, and yet, at what point does it stop being delusional?"

Dane Brugler, The Athletic's NFL Draft analyst, said the NFL area scouts that he talks to don't believe that Pavia will get drafted, but adds, "All it takes is one team to feel his magnetism during the interview process and focus more on his intangibles and accomplishments than his limitations."

Brugler's take on Pavia: "There are certain physical thresholds that NFL scouts look for, and that's where his evaluation gets complicated. He is under 5-10 with a longer release and average-at-best arm, especially when he pushes the ball downfield. Pavia shines on second-reaction plays when things fall apart, and he goes into backyard football mode. That can work at times in the NFL but will also lead to more negative results vs. NFL athletes than what we see on Saturdays. Being the catalyst of Vanderbilt's resurgence shouldn't and won't go unnoticed. The more the resume of a prospect grows, the more NFL teams are willing to overlook shortcomings. That helped Stetson Bennett become a fourth-round pick, although I don't think Pavia has Bennett's arm."

Perhaps the best comparison right now for Pavia isn't another quarterback but rather New York Giants running back Cam Skattebo, who had no offers out of high school and began his career at Sacramento State before getting a chance at a downtrodden Arizona State program. He may have lacked ideal measurables, but his toughness and grit jumped off the screen and transformed a 3-9 team predicted to finish last in the Big 12 in 2024 into an 11-3 team that won the conference and made the College Football Playoff.

There is one small downside to DiegoMania.

"You can only imagine how many coaches who are sending us guys saying, 'This guy is a lot like Diego,'" Simmons said. "It's like, 'OK, buddy.' Respectfully, that's a pretty rare comparison to make.

Pavia is the headliner, but is far from the only evaluation Simmons and his staff have hit on.

* Tight end Eli Stowers was a four-star QB coming out of high school, but is now Vanderbilt's leading pass catcher with 28 catches for 355 yards. He signed with Texas A&M but transferred to New Mexico State after two seasons and ultimately switched positions. Stowers is a freak athlete, and his mindset and character were also big selling points from the NMSU staff.

"It was a pretty easy evaluation," Simmons said. "The tape popped for a guy that was new to the position. The way he moved on film was impressive. These tight end profiles through the NFL Draft, so many of them played quarterback in high school or were a basketball star. You have these crazy diverse profiles. Eli matches that."

* Tight end Cole Spence is a former three-star recruit who mostly had Group of 5 offers. He is now 6-7 and 255 pounds and has emerged as a weapon in the passing game to complement Stowers. He is averaging 16 yards per reception and had a career-high five catches for 56 yards in the LSU win.

"He was a wrestler and played basketball and was just a really big kid," Simmons said. "We saw in him the frame. His junior tape was of a big developmental player, but there was some 7-on-7 tape that helped us feel comfortable that he's gonna have the movement skills to be a guy, too. Super character, super high care. The type of mentality that is a really safe bet."

* Center Jordan White is a two-time transfer who started his career at West Virginia before playing two seasons at Liberty. He was rated as a four-star transfer last offseason and has helped anchor a much-improved offensive line.

"We took (current starting guard) Chase Mitchell last year, who was coached at Liberty by our offensive line coach (Chris Klenakis)," Simmons said. "Chase was close with Jordan. We knew when Jordan graduated (from Liberty), we wanted to bring him in. He's an incredible leader and a tough kid who has helped build a really good culture in that O-line room."

* Defensive lineman Joshua Singh was an undersized former two-star recruit out of high school who spent four years at BYU. He has been a key addition to a rebuilt D-line and has contributed 3.5 tackles for loss.

"We looked at it as we're not gonna find a bunch of 6-6, 330-pounders, so can we piece together a room with skill sets?" Simmons said of the 6-foot, 285-pounder. "Steve Gregory, our DC, and Clark saw the disruptiveness that he could provide. ... Again, great mindset, toughness. We've been really pleased, obviously."

* Mark Davis is a 6-foot-2, 202-pound cornerback who is in his seventh season in a college career that has included three years at Buffalo and two at Southern Illinois.

"He's had some injuries in his past, but has really good traits -- he's got an 11-foot broad jump," Simmons said. "He's another really tough kid. We brought him in last year, and he tore his Achilles, and he never flinched. We got him knowing there was some injury risk, but he's playing really well."

As much as Simmons has learned from his time at Vanderbilt, it hasn't changed the way he would go about his old job in the online recruiting world. Over there, he said, you're evaluating and ranking guys based on their NFL projectability.

But what he's realized -- or at least come to terms with -- is that the goal now is to build the best college football program possible.

And what it requires to accomplish that isn't necessarily trying to land the most NFL prospects.

"Now, we want to build a team of NFL prospects, but through our process of building, (we want) a team that fits together," he said. "You can't have a bunch of 250-pound offensive linemen that you're trying to build into sort of that North Dakota State model because then what's your scout team look like? And, what happens if those guys don't put on the 40 pounds that you expected them to? The misses hurt way more than a degree of the hits being lower.

"As much as we've got some guys on the field who are really good players, part of our success this year is traced to our roster depth. (It's) so different than what it was just two years ago. We have way fewer guys who are just taking up a locker. In this modern era, rosters are compressed, and where the talent is more evenly dispersed, that depth is really important. I'm proud of where we're at on that front."

How a former Rivals recruiting analyst maximized his hit rate and built a top-10 team