Ravens cut the Heisman runner-up who was making Lamar sweat

Diego Pavia's NFL story took a wild turn on Thursday. The Vanderbilt product and 2025 Heisman Trophy runner-up, who went unselected through all 7 rounds of this year's draft before Baltimore scooped him up on a 3-year undrafted deal, is out of a job again. Adam Schefter broke the news first and clean: Ravens waived QB Diego Pavia.

The timing is what makes this sting. Pavia signed with Baltimore on May 1, and the Ravens waived him just one day before rookies were due to report to training camp -- 83 days after they'd made a point of scooping up one of the more talked-about undrafted names in the class. He'd become the first Heisman finalist to go undrafted since 2014, and the Ravens didn't even wait for a tryout before locking him up. Now he's back on the open market.

So why now, and why him? The boring, roster-math answer: Baltimore needed a spot for veteran center Ethan Pocic, who officially signed his free-agent deal the same day. That's the kind of paperwork transaction that happens every summer and usually doesn't generate a headline. But then Scott Barrett dropped a much juicier theory into the timeline.

Read that for what it is -- a tongue-in-cheek jab, not a locker-room report -- but it taps into something real. Pavia built his college legend at Vanderbilt and New Mexico State on scrappy, defiant, make-it-happen quarterbacking, the exact opposite of buttoned-up, and it's easy to see why a team with a $260-plus-million franchise quarterback wouldn't want a folk-hero backup stealing camp buzz. Lamar Jackson isn't losing his job to an undrafted rookie. Nobody thinks that. But the joke works precisely because Pavia has made a habit of forcing people to take him seriously anyway.

With Pavia gone, Baltimore's quarterback room now runs Jackson, veterans Tyler Huntley and Skylar Thompson, and fellow undrafted rookie Joe Fagnano out of UConn. Pavia himself isn't done -- he's subject to waivers, and if nobody claims him he becomes a free agent again, free to latch onto another camp battle somewhere with a thinner QB room and less pressure on the guy under center.