AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
6:14 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 8, 2010 Sports
Two hours before sunrise one Monday in September, Greg Davis wheeled an orange corduroy chair to the far end of a conference table in the room next to his office at Royal-Memorial Stadium. He poured coffee and produced a plastic barrel of animal crackers. Then he began the solemn work of trying to locate opportunities for failure in the Texas Tech football team.
Davis specifically watched the Texas Tech defense in the blitz. With a video remote in one hand and a laser in the other, he analyzed previous Red Raiders games for any sort of hint — like a tell at a poker table — that betrayed what the defense planned to do before it actually did it.
Davis scribbled cryptic notes in a three-ring binder containing pages that looked like spreadsheets. He watched, rewound, watched, rewound.
Texas had beaten Wyoming two days earlier. The Longhorns were 2-0 and ranked sixth in the country.
Davis and the other coaches had four days to calibrate for a Big 12 game in Lubbock that many observers believed would clarify just how good this Texas team might be. Davis, the Texas offensive coordinator who came 13 seasons ago from North Carolina along with head coach Mack Brown, was curious about that himself.
He also wondered about the nuanced disguises he’d implemented in the games against Rice and Wyoming. Did the Texas Tech coaches detect them? Believe them? Plan for them?
“We’ve put out some information,” Davis said wryly.
I’d suspected that kind of tactical deception existed in big-time college football. But until that morning three months ago, when Davis agreed to let me to watch him work as part of a profile I planned to write the week after the Oklahoma game, I never had heard a coach describe such games within a game.
Texas already had beaten Rice and Wyoming. And in those games, the Longhorns were playing, in part, Texas Tech.
“There’s a reason Hannibal cut off their heads and put them on spikes,” Davis said, referring to the famous military leader of ancient Carthage. “He wanted everybody to know: ‘Hey, I’m brutal.'”
Davis prepared well enough for Texas Tech. The Longhorns won the following Saturday, 24-14.
But the kindling of defeat ignited a week later when UCLA came to Austin. Oklahoma beat Texas seven days later in Dallas.
When Davis and I met in his office on Oct. 6, the Longhorns were 3-2. They were out of the national rankings for the first time in a decade. And 10 months after playing for the national championship, Davis was playing for even higher stakes: his career.
Brutal? Davis had no idea.
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Greg Davis interested me for many reasons. In my eight years of writing about the Texas Longhorns, I’d interviewed him probably a dozen times, usually to learn how certain plays functioned from his perspective in the box high above the line of scrimmage. His candor always impressed me. He told me what plays were named, why they were named that way and how each assignment affected the flow of the call.
Davis never seemed reluctant to discuss his work in any manner of detail. His countenance never seemed to change. He wore the same hairstyle (short, parted cleanly on the side), eyeglasses (modest, wire-rimmed) and wardrobe (khakis, loafers, often sockless). He seemed to me an exceptionally even man, a characteristic that kept him safely out of the headlines, good or bad.
Yet Davis had long been vilified by a segment of the Texas fan base that doubted his creativity and originality as a coordinator. Oddly enough, he rarely got much popular credit for the good seasons, such as when the Longhorns won the Rose Bowl in 2004, the BCS championship in 2005, the Fiesta Bowl in 2008 or the Big 12 title last year, when Texas lost to Alabama in its second trip to the BCS championship. But the poor seasons crashed on him and his playbook like an avalanche.
My profile began with a premise: Who is this lightning rod of a football coach who seemed so eternally decent at heart?
That question took me first to Groves, the small East Texas town between Port Arthur and Beaumont where the air smells like wet pavement. Davis grew up in Groves, the oldest of four children. He went to the Baptist church there, joined DeMolay and the Boy Scouts there, played Little League there, minded his parents’ strict curfew there.
“It was what home was supposed to be,” Davis told me.
He was an excellent athlete. He was a candidate to start at quarterback for Port Neches-Groves High School as a junior, but a senior also contended for the position. After spring camp, the head coach told a newspaper reporter that the senior would be his starter. For the first time in his life, Davis had been told he wasn’t good enough.
“I cut the article out,” he said in our interview. “I put it right above my bed. I read it every night. And I said, ‘I’ve got to do something to make this wrong.’ ”
Davis became the starting quarterback later that year.
He was named captain of the team. By the end of his senior season, Davis had broken many of the records his father, Rusty Davis, had set when he was a quarterback at Port Neches-Groves.
Rusty Davis said his children lived idyllic East Texas childhoods. Stability and consistency governed the Davis household on Foster Avenue. The three brothers and a sister knew they could play outside as long as they wanted, but they had to rest or read for an hour before they could go back outside. They had rules.
Greg Davis obeyed those rules. He rarely took risks, rarely found trouble. It was the late 1960s. Young people in America were pushing all sorts of limits. But in Groves, a young Greg Davis was respecting them. He had family, worship, football and friends. He was happy in his insulated corner of the world.
“That’s just the way he’s been,” his father told me one sunny afternoon in late September. “All his life.”
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McNeese State University in nearby Lake Charles, La., offered Davis a football scholarship after high school. He left one day for college, forgot his Bible, discovered the oversight and turned his car around. He drove back to Groves. “I knew right then he’d be OK,” said his mother, Dixie Casey.
He returned to Groves after he graduated from McNeese State. By that time, he had a wife, Patsy, and a son, Greg Jr.
Davis decided in college that he wanted to be a football coach. He won a state championship at Port Neches-Groves in 1975, an achievement he considered his greatest until Texas won the Rose Bowl in 2004. He left his old high school in 1978 to coach quarterbacks at Texas A&M. It was an important move at a pivotal time.
Davis had been a quarterback, was the son of a quarterback and considered the position the most interesting on the field. The quarterback made big decisions. The quarterback needed to be calm, smart, wise. He had to know more about the offense than anyone in the game. He led men.
“The guy who coaches quarterbacks, he’s kind of like the quarterback,” said Davis’ longtime friend R.C. Slocum, a defensive coach at Texas A&M when Davis arrived.
Davis spent six seasons in College Station. He met an ambitious Tennessean named Mack Brown in 1982, when the two were recruiting the same high school players from East Texas and western Louisiana. Brown was the young quarterbacks coach at LSU, and he came to College Station one week to watch the Aggies practice. “We had similar beliefs,” Davis said.
Brown and Davis learned a lot about one another that year. They were similar in mind and soul; both were from small towns, both had strong families, both had a deep faith. When Brown became the head coach at Tulane in 1985, he called on Davis to become his assistant.
Davis and Brown spent three seasons together at Tulane. Their teams weren’t terribly good — a 6-6 season in 1987 was their best — but Davis worked hard as Brown’s receivers coach, and the hours were long. Brown left Tulane for North Carolina in 1988. Davis took his job, coached Tulane to a 14-31 record over four seasons and was fired after a dismal 1-10 record in 1991. He quoted scripture at his final press conference. He coached quarterbacks at Arkansas and Georgia for two seasons each, then joined his friend and former partner in Chapel Hill, N.C.
Davis became Brown’s offensive coordinator at North Carolina, a basketball school the two of them took to the Gator Bowl after seasons of 10-2 and 10-1. The University of Texas called after the 1997 season. Brown and Davis moved to Austin. They looked inseparable, as conjoined as tongue and groove.
Even in October, when I spent 75 minutes with Davis in his office, nothing felt amiss. Davis said he and Brown had never spoken about the end, whatever form that end might take. He said his health was good at the age of 59. I asked him if he’d ever feared for his job, given the vitriol he often endured — on message boards, or walking to the dressing room at Royal-Memorial Stadium — in his career.
“No,” he said.
At that moment, Davis was in the middle of his 38th year as a football coach, the last 13 of them at Texas with Brown. Until that moment, I had never seen so much as a flicker of his temper.
But when I asked him about his fundamental football truths — those principles embedded in the heart of a football coach — Davis reached under his desk.
A book materialized. Davis called it his “quality control” manual. He opened it to the first page.
“I could give you a thousand numbers,” he said.
Instead, he pointed to one.
His data showed that a category called “scoring offense” determines whether a team wins or loses. Davis had arrived at this conclusion by studying the top college football teams from the past 10 seasons. He motioned me closer to see.
“I know what causes winning and losing,” he said, his pitch rising. “Don’t talk to me about running the ball, throwing the ball. That’s the No. 1 factor.”
He composed himself. “It’s not opinion,” he said. “It’s fact. If at some point that’s not good enough, then that’s not good enough.”
In their next game, the Longhorns won 20-13 win over undefeated Nebraska at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Neb. That was just about the last time Texas was good enough in 2010.
The Longhorns lost five of their last six games. Speculation soared. The question wasn’t whether coaching changes would come. The question was which coaching changes would come. The criticism of Davis from the public reached deafening levels. Brown openly questioned his assistants. The humiliation reached critical mass on Oct. 30. A small plane circled Royal-Memorial Stadium before the Baylor game, trailing a banner. “Greg Davis,” the words read, “Is
Not Our Standard.”
The profile I planned to write took a different shape after that game, which Texas lost.
I knew it would still be done. But I suspected it would be finished after Davis assumed a different role with the Texas Longhorns, possibly as a position coach working exclusively with quarterbacks, possibly in athletic administration. I hoped to have one more interview with Davis once his future was clear.
Now it is.
I did talk with Davis one final time, but I wouldn’t characterize it as an interview. I drove to his house Sunday afternoon. His wife answered the door. Davis was in a chair in the living room, watching a football game on TV in bare feet. He was wearing jeans. I’d never seen him in jeans.
I asked him about reports that he’d submitted his resignation that day. I asked him if the newspaper could expect his resignation soon.
Davis denied the reports.
The team announced his resignation Monday. I know now he was observing a fidelity to Brown, who likely wanted the news released on a different timetable. I suspect Brown wanted to give his longtime colleague a fittingly respectful farewell.
Instead, it came in a news release e-mailed while Brown was out of town.
“It’s bigger than me,” Davis told me in October. “It’s a lot bigger than me. They’re going to play football here long after I’m in the big press box in the sky.”
I knew right then I’d use that line in the story. What I didn’t know then is that I’d use it in the story that I ended up having to write.
