{"id":349443,"date":"2025-12-15T04:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T04:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/349443\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T04:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T04:41:07","slug":"heisman-trophy-josh-pate-reacts-to-fernando-mendoza-winning-diego-pavia-losing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/349443\/","title":{"rendered":"Heisman Trophy: Josh Pate reacts to Fernando Mendoza winning, Diego Pavia losing"},"content":{"rendered":"

College football analyst Josh Pate<\/a> had an interesting reaction to Fernando Mendoza<\/a> winning the Heisman Trophy over Diego Pavia<\/a>. Pate conceded he would\u2019ve voted for the Vandy<\/a> star in Pavia, but put the onus on the voters, which he does not have.<\/p>\n

Mendoza ended up winning by a landslide. Pavia was a favorite going into last week, but the odds flipped once Mendoza led Indiana<\/a> to the Big Ten title over Ohio State<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this comparison here, neither one of them had transcendent, great seasons or anything like that,\u201d Pate said on his show Sunday night.<\/a> \u201cThey\u2019re not going to be remembered as one of the 10 best Heisman seasons. Period. There\u2019s a lot of merit to Fernando Mendoza. I just happen to think Diego Pavia was the most outstanding player in college football this year. Last I checked, that\u2019s the definition of the award. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe was the leading rusher in seven of his 12 games, and still had more passing yards than Fernando Mendoza did and played one fewer game. But people weren\u2019t paying attention. I\u2019m telling you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pate argued the Heisman vote should\u2019ve been closer than it was, due to Pavia actually outplaying Mendoza in his mind. That was the case over the course of the regular season, but Mendoza had one more national stage to shine on, even if he didn\u2019t light the world on fire vs. Ohio State.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what? I\u2019m not going to complain about it. I know a lot of the folks that have Heisman votes and how they watch this sport, not all of them,\u201d Pate said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of folks who have Heisman votes. Some of them were glued to this every week, and they did their due diligence. And if you did that, I don\u2019t really care who you voted for, because you did your job.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people have votes and just didn\u2019t pay a whole lot of attention. And the reason I know that is because going into Conference Championship Saturday, Diego Pavia was the favorite to win the award, and by the end of the Big Ten championship game, Fernando Mendoza was -3000 to win the award. And so you may think to yourself, \u2018Oh, dude, they must have beat Ohio State 55-19. He must have thrown for 500 yards.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when Pate doubled down and pointed out the eventual Heisman winner\u2019s stat line against the Buckeyes. Mendoza\u2019s game against Ohio State shouldn\u2019t have made it a landslide win over Pavia for the top individual award in college football.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey won the game. He was 15-of-23, for 222 yards, one touchdown, one pick. Took a big hit to start the game. But like, does that really sound like the kind of performance that would have overwhelmingly tilted the scales,\u201d Pate said. \u201cNo, unless people hadn\u2019t really been paying a whole lot of attention and just decided to cast their vote at the 11th hour with whatever the last shiny object they saw was. That\u2019s kind of how he won the award, not saying he\u2019s not deserving of it. I\u2019m just saying, for anyone who\u2019s looking for an explanation about why the margin was so wide, it just wasn\u2019t even close, that\u2019s why.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"College football analyst Josh Pate had an interesting reaction to Fernando Mendoza winning the Heisman Trophy over Diego…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[125269,7314,99],"class_list":["post-349443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-diego-pavia-20-volcano-vista","tag-fernando-mendoza-22-columbus","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}