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OFFICIAL 2020 COLLEGE FOOTBALL OFFSEASON THREAD
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by Bobby Layne,
- Start date
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I don't want to overreact to a Week 0 game, Florida can definitely improve and Miami might actually end up being a really good team, but if this is the Florida team we get all season they're about to go 8-4. Alot of the Florida offseason hype was based on Franks making some huge leap but he looks like the same dude from last season
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Florida will improve but they damn sure won’t finish in the top ten. Franks is absolute trash but is arrogant at the same time
dacomeup
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To be fair, and I hate them so I'm definitely not defending them, the CBs for the Gators didn't give up much. Hendo and Wilson were pretty good. Wilson with the boneheaded PI.
However, their Safeties and Nickel guys stink in coverage. They should great Brad Stewart back so that'll help, but Dean, Stiner and Taylor are hugeeee liabilities. Those LBs in coverage are garbage as well.
However, their Safeties and Nickel guys stink in coverage. They should great Brad Stewart back so that'll help, but Dean, Stiner and Taylor are hugeeee liabilities. Those LBs in coverage are garbage as well.
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I actually think their offense will be consistent decent because all their receivers and backs are basically on the same level, their defense is the bigger issue imo, they really can't afford any attrition. Don't see them beating UGA, Auburn, LSU or even Mizzou.
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bigmike23
Bo Calvert ruled ineligible indefinitely? Any idea what the story is there?———
We didn’t really notice him yesterday live but things were tough to follow. Did Jaelan Phillips play? How was he?
Verde Shuttles
dacomeup
dacomeup
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Phillips has to sit a year. He's not even practicing yet. They're trying to get him fully healthy.
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Unless he gets a record deal first
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I see.
Final verdict on the talent from the weekend: UF had the numbers and high motors, but the UM talent we mingled with definitely averaged a higher star rating.
Thoughts on that assessment? @MVP @ecook0808
Final verdict on the talent from the weekend: UF had the numbers and high motors, but the UM talent we mingled with definitely averaged a higher star rating.
Thoughts on that assessment? @MVP @ecook0808
dacomeup
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His music is so trash.
Wouldn't be shocked if he never plays a down at Miami though.
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Link?His music is so trash.
Wouldn't be shocked if he never plays a down at Miami though.
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either PED's or money. NCAA ruled him ineligible not ucla
tried to tell yall
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Jesus that game last night was terrible, I wouldn’t feel good about either team
And CJ Henderson looks allergic to contact.. don’t even know how to properly judge jabari, because Miami’s oline was so bad and dudes wouldn’t adjust the snap count/cadence and just move the te over to that side to chip or run screens bubble plays to that side something to help out the oline
And CJ Henderson looks allergic to contact.. don’t even know how to properly judge jabari, because Miami’s oline was so bad and dudes wouldn’t adjust the snap count/cadence and just move the te over to that side to chip or run screens bubble plays to that side something to help out the oline
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Would somebody mind posting the Bruce Feldman Athletic story abt the Cal safety? Thanks
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I forgot about this
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Up a winding road through a coastal forest northwest of Santa Cruz, California, is the village of Bonny Doon. Amid a seemingly endless array of towering redwoods are six acres of land that a young man who grew up here, Ashtyn Davis, jokingly calls “The Compound.”
At The Compound there is heavy machinery, downed logs and bundles of wire fence. There also are wild animals like mountain lions and domesticated ones like the family-owned goats, cows and horses. There is the house where Davis grew up, one his dad built and his mom still lives in. Next to that is his grandfather’s house. His uncle lived in a third house on the property.
Davis spent much of his time here climbing trees, riding dirt bikes or playing baseball with his friends. His passion for sports — baseball, football and basketball — as a kid is commemorated in a water-logged binder that his maternal grandfather still keeps close at hand.
It was Davis’ sixth-grade art project. In it, he writes, “One day I hope to be famous. My dream is to play in the NFL, NBA and MLB, all at once until I am too old to play. Sports is my hobby and that is all I do. One day I hope to wish upon a star and try to tackle any chance I have at making my dream come true.”
Davis’ grandfather calls it his most prized possession.
When Davis made the binder, the dreams it contained seemed so far-fetched. “Going into high school, I weighed 90 pounds,” Davis says, adding that he was 5-foot-4 as a sophomore. “It was pretty pathetic honestly.”
He pulls up a picture of himself, a tot around a cluster of football players who weren’t particularly big either. “There I am, No. 11, a pretty scrawny kid.
“I was waiting for my time. My dad is 6-4 and my mom is 5-9, so I figured it was coming.”
Davis (No. 11) as a high school sophomore. (Courtesy Ashtyn Davis)
Davis was right.
He never had a 247Sports or Rivals recruiting profile. He never had a Hudl profile. There was no trace of him in the vast online recruiting world. Five years ago when he was a high school senior, Ashtyn Davis actually didn’t even know any of those things existed.
Even when he joined the team at Cal as a walk-on, he retained much of his anonymity. Some of the Cal staff under former head coach Sonny ****s thought his name was Jake. “There was another kid on our team named Jake Ashton,” Davis says. “I think that was the confusion because my first name is Ashtyn, I think, but I was getting called Jake for like two or three years and I wouldn’t say anything.”
Finally, however, he is a known quantity. As he enters his final season with the Bears, the walk-on, zero-star prospect has become the most athletic safety in college football and the No. 2 player at his position on 2020 NFL draft boards.
As Davis’ growth spurt kicked in before his sophomore year of high school, so did Osgood Schlatter disease, a painful ailment that sets in just below the knee. Davis’ condition appeared so bad that one of his high school football coaches thought he shouldn’t be out on the field trying to play.
“He was puny,” says Sergio Escobar, one of the assistants at Santa Cruz High. “We come into the first couple of games and I’m like, who is that hurt kid out there? We need to pull that kid out. It looks so painful to run. ‘Dude, just sit out. You’re gonna get hurt out there.’ He was respectful but he looked at me like, ‘Coach you must be out of your damn mind if you’re gonna pull me out of this game.’ ”
Davis struggled getting around that entire season, but Escobar said the following year as a junior he was blown away by the kid’s transformation. “It was like, ‘Holy crap!’ He definitely made a name for himself just in terms of being a true football player. He was so hungry, I knew he had the mindset to be good at whatever he chose to do.”
Escobar remembers a moment after a play during Davis’ junior season that reinforced that notion.
“He goes up with the DB draped on him and snags the ball,” he says. “He gets up, ‘I caught it! I caught it!’ And the DB is really mad. He smacks the ball out of his hands and Ashtyn catches it with his knees. He points at the ball, like ‘He still didn’t make me drop it!’ That to me showed me that competitiveness that made him so different. Like, you may think this play is over, but I’m still playing football and I’m not gonna let you get any satisfaction of winning any rep.”
Davis at the family “Compound” this summer. (Bruce Feldman / The Athletic)
Santa Cruz is an eclectic surf town that was the backdrop to both “The Lost Boys”, the late 1980s cult vampire movie, and “Us”, Jordan Peele’s 2019 thriller. The last football players of note the town produced were the Ayenbadejo brothers 20 years ago.
“Growing up there everyone assumes you either surf or smoke weed,” Davis said. He did neither.
Few people carved out time to watch the Santa Cruz High football team. In Davis’ junior season, the Cardinals only had 17 players, one of their offensive linemen weighed only 155 pounds. They finished 1-9. Those are not the kind of numbers that attract fans, and certainly not college scouts. “I would say on a good night, there might be 50 people in the bleachers watching,” Davis says. “It was like nobody cared.”
After football season his junior year, Davis took up track to try and get faster for football. He’d played well enough the previous season that playing non-scholarship Division III football at the University of Redlands was a possibility. But that was before he showed up to run in the state high school track and field prelims in the 110 hurdles. Davis’ mindset was that he wasn’t just there to compete, he was going to use it as a career fair.
He remembers, “I pretty much went up to every person that I could find with a Division I shirt or that was holding a clipboard, ‘Hey, my name is Ashtyn.’ ”
Davis ran one of the fastest times of the day. “It was another guy who won the race, but I’m watching this kid thinking, ‘Who is that guy running close to him at the end? I need to talk to that kid,’ ” says Mike Gipson, Cal’s sprint coach.
Before going home to Bonny Doon, Davis had scored business cards from staffers at Washington, UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly and Cal with opportunities to walk on as a track athlete — and hopefully, he reasoned, parlay that into a doorway into that school’s football program. Washington wasn’t realistic because, he says, his family was not going be able to afford it. UCSB didn’t have football, so Davis wasn’t interested in them. He visited Cal Poly and Cal and opted to become a Bear because, he says, “I wanted to play with the best possible competition.”
Because Davis got involved with Cal track so late in his senior year, he didn’t get admitted to school for the fall of 2014. He stayed home, took a language class at the local junior college and worked for his father, Sean Davis, dragging brush to feed a wood chipper.
He enrolled at Cal in the winter of the 2014-15 school year and did much better than he expected as a college hurdler, winning several meet championships in the 60- and 110-meter hurdles.
But no one in the Cal football program knew about him. Davis and his father Googled people in the Cal football office and just kept sending emails to the Bears’ director of football operations. He eventually responded by saying, “Yeah, we need bodies. Come up.”
The next year, in the spring of 2015, he made the Cal football team as a walk-on. They gave him a jersey and didn’t seem to notice him much, he says, other than that when he would get on scout team and go hard, it would really piss people off. Just like that catch during his junior year at Santa Cruz High.
Davis emerged as a track star for Cal by his sophomore season of 2016, finishing second in the 110-meter hurdles at the Pac-12 Championships and earning second-team All-American honors.
As a member of the football team, he would see the starters doing things he always believed that he could do. Because he competed so hard, he figured that’d be the way to get noticed. One day after practice ****s came up to him and asked him his name and what year he was.
“I’m a freshman,” Davis replied.
“That was pretty much the extent of the interaction,” Davis says now, “but it felt like I had done something good.”
Around that time, the Cal track coaches called him in for a meeting and told him they wanted to put him on scholarship. But, they added, that would mean he could not play football.
Davis thought about the offer but didn’t immediately decide. He remembered what he wrote in that sixth-grade art project, and in the intervening years had a lot of people telling him he was just going to be a scout-team punching bag. “But in my head,” Davis says, “I knew that I would rather be a scout team player or a dummy and do what I do and I love every day, than be an all-American in track all the time.”
Davis’ maternal grandfather, Roger Mahutga, cherishes his grandson’s depiction of his life goals. (Courtesy Ashtyn Davis)
Davis said he’d need to talk to his parents first.
“At that point, I was like, maybe track is the way to go just because I didn’t want to put that burden on my parents, who were gonna have to pay my way through school, if there was a way out,” he says. “But them and my grandpa were like, ‘We will find a way to make this work. We’ll take out loans, whatever we need to do in order to afford you this opportunity to try to pursue what you love.’ ”
If NFL scouts wonder about the source of Davis’ determination and focus, they need to head to The Compound. For all of the great memories Davis has of growing up there, he has made it through some devastating times.
Sean Davis and Ashtyn’s mom, Christine, were high school sweethearts in Santa Cruz. He was a senior. She was a freshman. He came back into town after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, was going for his masters to become a college professor and was the frontman for a popular Bay Area alternative rap band, Code III. They opened for Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine and Body Count. “We lasted about five years in the mid-’90s,” Sean Davis says.
Christine was one of their biggest fans. “I told my friends, we’d make cute kids,” she says.
They got married, bought a trailer on the land in Bonny Doon that her dad had purchased, had Ashtyn and then 18 months later had his sister Lexi. But Sean’s life had been spiraling out of control in the wake of his father’s death.
“I didn’t want to face the fact that my father had died,” he says. “The band had broken up. I’d dropped out of grad school, and she was gonna rescue me.”
Sean had been a recreational drug user, but his issues escalated into methamphetamine and then crack cocaine. The couple got divorced after seven years of marriage.
“It got pretty bad,” Christine says.
Addiction also had been an issue for Ashtyn’s maternal grandfather in the 1980s. “My dad is an ex-addict with methamphetamine,” Christine says. “He was only 15 when I was born. It was crank in the ’80s. He was pretty deep for six or seven years. Ashtyn has a lot of heavy addiction in his family.”
For a 5-year-old Ashtyn, it was hard to process what was happening with his family, especially with his dad. “I just knew something was up,” he says.
Christine says, “Ashtyn, who was always very attached to his dad, didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to talk to him. A lot of stuff that Ashtyn remembers, I didn’t know he remembered. He was like 5. He shared a lot in the last couple of years that I thought he had been shielded of. He wanted his dad to be there. He remembers him coming to functions and he was either under the influence or kids would tease him because his clothes smelled like smoke.
“Ashtyn is really hard to get to open up. I asked him if he wanted to go to counseling. He says that’s what drives him. That’s why he’s always been so adamant about no drugs, no alcohol, no anything. He knows he has an addictive personality. He’s addicted to adrenaline clearly.”
Ashtyn always had a penchant for risk-taking, whether it was doing crazy aerial stunts on motorcycles or backflips off the cliffs at Lighthouse Point near the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where there’s an old posted sign warning visitors that 100 people have perished from leaping from that point and drowning, often from not understanding the directions of the tide.
“It did worry me when parents were sending me videos of him jumping him off a cliff,” she says. “I trusted him for the most part. But I’m not saying it didn’t scare me, because I would seriously wait for that text to come. He’s always been hard to deter from pushing the boundaries.”
The one thing Ashtyn has never risked was getting involved with alcohol or drugs, he says.
“In high school, something that I struggled with was a lot of people would be smoking and drinking for the first time,” he says. “And I always knew that I wanted to stay away from that stuff because of my peers, because of my dad.”
Sean Davis was homeless for 10 months in 2008 because of his addictions. He tried once to get sober but fell off after four months. The second time he went through a seven-day detox program but says that didn’t take at all. The third time he was different.
“I’ve been sober since Oct. 20, 2008,” Sean Davis says. “Ashtyn’s birthday is Oct. 10. I missed his 11th birthday. I’d never missed either one of my kids’ birthdays. And I was so out there this time, I didn’t even know it happened.”
Christine, who had gotten re-married, called and cussed him out.
“She told me that she didn’t care if I ever saw my kids again and if I needed help to call my mom, because I had not shown up for my kids,” Sean remembers.
“That hit home pretty hard. I ended up calling my mom right after I talked to her. My mom said, ‘If you show up at my house tomorrow sober, I’ll get you in a treatment center one more time.’ That’s what I did, and ever since then I stayed connected and started doing the work.”
What changed that time, he says, was that he actually did the work — working the 12 steps of recovery, having a sponsor, being of service and staying connected to his support group. Davis would sometimes bring Ashtyn and Lexi with him to his meetings.
Sean has spent the past decade of his sobriety as an arborist. He’d actually started climbing trees 20 years ago for work when there was a lull in his construction jobs, helping a guy down the street who ran a tree service. He had two near-tragic falls, one from 30 feet up and another from 40 feet up that left him with a dislocated hip, a broken wrist and a compound fracture of the elbow. He was high on the job. Since getting sober, he’s had to re-learn how to climb trees. Now, he has his credentials and is more on the administrative side. But sometimes he still climbs, going up as many as 200 feet. He says there’s nothing like that adrenaline rush.
The adrenaline craving runs in the family. But Ashtyn has harnessed it in constructive ways. Sean Davis is proud to say that the only time he ever got called by the police for his son was when Ashtyn was out past curfew as a designated driver taking his drunk friends home.
“That’s where he got a lot of his trust from me and his mom,” Sean Davis says. “He earned trust points that way because he wasn’t the guy that was going out drinking and wreaking havoc. He didn’t cut class. He always got good grades. Teachers loved him. Coaches loved him. Easy.”
In the indoor track season of 2017, his third in the track program, Ashtyn Davis made All-American as a hurdler. The following fall, he finally got onto the field for the football team, playing special teams as a gunner flying by everyone on the field. Davis earned the team’s special teams MVP award.
He also started the final three games at cornerback after Cal was rocked by a bunch of injuries. He had the length and speed coaches love in a cover man, but his technique was a mess. Then again, so was the Cal defense, which ranked in the bottom 10 in FBS. ****s was fired a month after the season. A new coaching staff came in, with head coach Justin Wilcox taking over. Former NFL defensive back Gerald Alexander was hired as the Bears’ secondary coach.
“I just felt like, here’s my opportunity,” Davis says. “I knew that everyone’s starting on the same level now. What am I going to do to be better?”
Alexander told his DB room that if anyone has questions, come up early in the morning. He wanted to be a resource to his players, and that it’s all voluntary.
Davis showed up the next morning at 5:30. They studied film together so Davis could better understand his plays. Davis kept showing up before dawn, and they would talk for an hour. Soon, he was switched from corner to safety. Alexander schooled him on the communications and the calls. They’d watch NFL film, the Bears’ spring film, anything the could get their hands on.
“It just opened up a whole new part of the game for me,” Davis says. “I see it so much differently now. I was able to play fast. Something just clicked for me.
“In high school, it was line up at 10 yards and either follow their best player or tackle the running back. That’s what the defense was for me. Once GA (Alexander) showed me this aspect of football, I fell in love with the game again. There’s so much more to it than people realize. It’s awesome. I’m high on that right now. At safety I can notice, ‘Okay, this guy’s split is a little tight. He might do this based on film study and stuff like that. There’s so much more to it that I feel like I can do if I’m willing to put the work in, and I can get so much better at that than I can at corner.”
He got his first start at safety on Oct. 13, 2017, against No. 8 Washington State. On the Cougars’ first play from scrimmage, Davis shot through from his safety spot to make a big stick on a running back. The defense was in Cover 4, and he just read his keys, saw the down block and knew the ball was coming his way. It was at that moment, he says, he felt validated.
The Bears stunned Washington State that night, winning 37-3. Davis finished the season with 33 tackles and an interception and, again, was the Bears’ special teams MVP after ranking ninth in the nation in kick return yardage. That’s also the season he was put on scholarship.
In 2018, Davis was the cornerstone for one of the nation’s top defenses as the Bears had a breakthrough under Wilcox. Davis picked off four passes and made 56 tackles and was named first-team All-Pac-12.
Davis had the first of five pass breakups in the 2018 season opener and finished the season as the Bears’ third-leading tackler. (Matt Cohen / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Davis has become a film junkie. A typical Saturday night for him would be to drive down to off-campus apartment of Cam Bynum and Elijah Hicks, Cal’s starting corners, and spend three hours geeking out on NFL cut-ups. “If we’re watching a team that is not us, we’ll usually watch a team that runs similar schemes to us,” Davis says. Washington is similar, he says. Wisconsin, where Wilcox had previously run the defense, is similar. They also watch a lot of the 49ers, Chargers and Seahawks and the 2017 Jaguars.
Davis’ stock in NFL personnel folks’ eyes has soared in the past year. Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy has a Day 2 draft grade him. “Big fan. Love his smarts and range,” Nagy said this week. The Athletic’s Dane Brugler has him rated as the No. 37 prospect and No. 2 safety in the 2020 draft.
Alexander is even more effusive: “He has tremendous top-end speed. This kid is different than anybody I’ve ever been around. He has the size, speed and physicality, and his ceiling is so high because he has only been playing safety for a season and a half. He has shown the ability to tackle in space, he can cover and he makes plays with great range when the ball is in the air.”
Davis will graduate soon with a double major in legal studies and social welfare, a major he says he pursued because “I just knew I wanted to help people.” He’s thought about going to law school but says he knows he would get antsy sitting behind a desk. Now, after football, he has a different idea. He’d like to become a firefighter, partly inspired by a job fair he attended in the spring.
“They had all of these professional round tables and I thought, I’m going to go to the table that looked the happiest, and they looked like the happiest dudes,” Davis says. “I started asking them questions, and it sounded like something I would enjoy.”
But the dream that Davis wrote about in sixth grade about making it to the NFL also seems very plausible. Last year when he wrapped up his track career at Cal by qualifying for the NCAA championships for the first time, he turned down agents who were hoping to get him to go pro in that sport. His parents, along with his sister Lexi and Christine’s husband Bob, will road trip, together, to every game this season, which might seem odd unless you’ve been to The Compound.
“My parents get along really well,” the defensive back says. “They’ll drive eight hours to games together. It’s kinda bizarre to me, but I’m so thankful that they get along like that because I know it’s not usually like that.”
From left to right, Ashtyn’s friend Nick Nolan, father Sean Davis, Ashtyn, mother Christine Mahutga-Cohen, grandfather Roger Mahutga, cousin Rachel Mahutga, sister Lexi Davis and stepfather Bob Cohen. (Bruce Feldman / The Athletic)
The bond between Davis’ parents is a unique one that probably has a lot to do with their son’s outlook, one that stems from Christine’s understanding of addiction from her own parents and the break-up of their marriage.
“We made an agreement to always put the kids first, even if I was super sick,” Sean says. “She always presented that to the kids and me being sick, and not as me being a deadbeat or a bad person. It was ‘you’re dad’s sick.’ No matter our problems, we don’t bad-mouth each other to the kids. We deal with each other. It’s a really unique relationship, and we’ve sacrificed a lot. It involved both of us swallowing a lot when we don’t want to for the sake of the kids.”
Says Christine, “People think it’s really weird, but we agreed long ago that it’s really important for both the kids to have that foundation because that is what’s best for them. As a kid, I felt torn between both parents and I never wanted our kids to feel that way. I always reassured them that he loved them. That was big for me in trying to change the pattern.”
Three years ago, Ashtyn and his sister showed up at their dad’s house on the anniversary of his eight-year sobriety.
“Dad, we have something to show you,” they said.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Here, look.”
They each rolled up their sleeves and showed him they both got the exact same tattoo on the inside of their wrists depicting mind, body and spirit, protected by God, and honoring his sobriety date in Roman numerals.
“I was super overwhelmed by it,” Sean says. “At first I was kinda scared because they put the date on it, which means it’s kinda solidified. If I start drinking again, I’ve ruined three wrists. I told her, why would you put the date on there? She says, regardless of if you drink again or not, that’s the day we got our daddy back. The next day I went down and got my own version of the same tattoo.
“I share it as part of my story. I’m in recovery. I get choked up, even when I just said it now — the day we got our daddy back — is hard to even utter that without welling up. It makes it worth it. I never lied to them about who was I was or what I came from. I think I get to be a signal of strength and inspiration and hard work just by staying sober and being honest about it.”
It was Ashtyn’s first tattoo.
He now has a sleeve of them on his right arm.
“All of Ashtyn’s tattoos have deep meanings,” Christine says, “but he won’t share them. They all have meanings but no one knows.”
“We have ideas,” his sister chimes in.
“We speculate,” Christine says.
Weeks later, his mom mentions something Wilcox said at Pac-12 media day, that her son is finally started to come out of his shell this year. In high school whenever he won awards, he’d always accept them looking down, Christine says. She’d encourage him to hold his head up. She thinks coming from a broken home contributed to that, and that seeing the issues with his father also caused him a lot of insecurity. None of that seemed “normal”, whatever exactly that was.
“This is really the first time I’ve seen him open up about who he is and where he comes from,” she says. “I’ve definitely seen a change in the more confidence he gets. This whole process and those coaches, Gerald, have been really good for him.”
It’s another sign of the continued growth of a person and player who started so small but with such big dreams.
At The Compound there is heavy machinery, downed logs and bundles of wire fence. There also are wild animals like mountain lions and domesticated ones like the family-owned goats, cows and horses. There is the house where Davis grew up, one his dad built and his mom still lives in. Next to that is his grandfather’s house. His uncle lived in a third house on the property.
Davis spent much of his time here climbing trees, riding dirt bikes or playing baseball with his friends. His passion for sports — baseball, football and basketball — as a kid is commemorated in a water-logged binder that his maternal grandfather still keeps close at hand.
It was Davis’ sixth-grade art project. In it, he writes, “One day I hope to be famous. My dream is to play in the NFL, NBA and MLB, all at once until I am too old to play. Sports is my hobby and that is all I do. One day I hope to wish upon a star and try to tackle any chance I have at making my dream come true.”
Davis’ grandfather calls it his most prized possession.
When Davis made the binder, the dreams it contained seemed so far-fetched. “Going into high school, I weighed 90 pounds,” Davis says, adding that he was 5-foot-4 as a sophomore. “It was pretty pathetic honestly.”
He pulls up a picture of himself, a tot around a cluster of football players who weren’t particularly big either. “There I am, No. 11, a pretty scrawny kid.
“I was waiting for my time. My dad is 6-4 and my mom is 5-9, so I figured it was coming.”
Davis (No. 11) as a high school sophomore. (Courtesy Ashtyn Davis)
Davis was right.
He never had a 247Sports or Rivals recruiting profile. He never had a Hudl profile. There was no trace of him in the vast online recruiting world. Five years ago when he was a high school senior, Ashtyn Davis actually didn’t even know any of those things existed.
Even when he joined the team at Cal as a walk-on, he retained much of his anonymity. Some of the Cal staff under former head coach Sonny ****s thought his name was Jake. “There was another kid on our team named Jake Ashton,” Davis says. “I think that was the confusion because my first name is Ashtyn, I think, but I was getting called Jake for like two or three years and I wouldn’t say anything.”
Finally, however, he is a known quantity. As he enters his final season with the Bears, the walk-on, zero-star prospect has become the most athletic safety in college football and the No. 2 player at his position on 2020 NFL draft boards.
As Davis’ growth spurt kicked in before his sophomore year of high school, so did Osgood Schlatter disease, a painful ailment that sets in just below the knee. Davis’ condition appeared so bad that one of his high school football coaches thought he shouldn’t be out on the field trying to play.
“He was puny,” says Sergio Escobar, one of the assistants at Santa Cruz High. “We come into the first couple of games and I’m like, who is that hurt kid out there? We need to pull that kid out. It looks so painful to run. ‘Dude, just sit out. You’re gonna get hurt out there.’ He was respectful but he looked at me like, ‘Coach you must be out of your damn mind if you’re gonna pull me out of this game.’ ”
Davis struggled getting around that entire season, but Escobar said the following year as a junior he was blown away by the kid’s transformation. “It was like, ‘Holy crap!’ He definitely made a name for himself just in terms of being a true football player. He was so hungry, I knew he had the mindset to be good at whatever he chose to do.”
Escobar remembers a moment after a play during Davis’ junior season that reinforced that notion.
“He goes up with the DB draped on him and snags the ball,” he says. “He gets up, ‘I caught it! I caught it!’ And the DB is really mad. He smacks the ball out of his hands and Ashtyn catches it with his knees. He points at the ball, like ‘He still didn’t make me drop it!’ That to me showed me that competitiveness that made him so different. Like, you may think this play is over, but I’m still playing football and I’m not gonna let you get any satisfaction of winning any rep.”
Davis at the family “Compound” this summer. (Bruce Feldman / The Athletic)
Santa Cruz is an eclectic surf town that was the backdrop to both “The Lost Boys”, the late 1980s cult vampire movie, and “Us”, Jordan Peele’s 2019 thriller. The last football players of note the town produced were the Ayenbadejo brothers 20 years ago.
“Growing up there everyone assumes you either surf or smoke weed,” Davis said. He did neither.
Few people carved out time to watch the Santa Cruz High football team. In Davis’ junior season, the Cardinals only had 17 players, one of their offensive linemen weighed only 155 pounds. They finished 1-9. Those are not the kind of numbers that attract fans, and certainly not college scouts. “I would say on a good night, there might be 50 people in the bleachers watching,” Davis says. “It was like nobody cared.”
After football season his junior year, Davis took up track to try and get faster for football. He’d played well enough the previous season that playing non-scholarship Division III football at the University of Redlands was a possibility. But that was before he showed up to run in the state high school track and field prelims in the 110 hurdles. Davis’ mindset was that he wasn’t just there to compete, he was going to use it as a career fair.
He remembers, “I pretty much went up to every person that I could find with a Division I shirt or that was holding a clipboard, ‘Hey, my name is Ashtyn.’ ”
Davis ran one of the fastest times of the day. “It was another guy who won the race, but I’m watching this kid thinking, ‘Who is that guy running close to him at the end? I need to talk to that kid,’ ” says Mike Gipson, Cal’s sprint coach.
Before going home to Bonny Doon, Davis had scored business cards from staffers at Washington, UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly and Cal with opportunities to walk on as a track athlete — and hopefully, he reasoned, parlay that into a doorway into that school’s football program. Washington wasn’t realistic because, he says, his family was not going be able to afford it. UCSB didn’t have football, so Davis wasn’t interested in them. He visited Cal Poly and Cal and opted to become a Bear because, he says, “I wanted to play with the best possible competition.”
Because Davis got involved with Cal track so late in his senior year, he didn’t get admitted to school for the fall of 2014. He stayed home, took a language class at the local junior college and worked for his father, Sean Davis, dragging brush to feed a wood chipper.
He enrolled at Cal in the winter of the 2014-15 school year and did much better than he expected as a college hurdler, winning several meet championships in the 60- and 110-meter hurdles.
But no one in the Cal football program knew about him. Davis and his father Googled people in the Cal football office and just kept sending emails to the Bears’ director of football operations. He eventually responded by saying, “Yeah, we need bodies. Come up.”
The next year, in the spring of 2015, he made the Cal football team as a walk-on. They gave him a jersey and didn’t seem to notice him much, he says, other than that when he would get on scout team and go hard, it would really piss people off. Just like that catch during his junior year at Santa Cruz High.
Davis emerged as a track star for Cal by his sophomore season of 2016, finishing second in the 110-meter hurdles at the Pac-12 Championships and earning second-team All-American honors.
As a member of the football team, he would see the starters doing things he always believed that he could do. Because he competed so hard, he figured that’d be the way to get noticed. One day after practice ****s came up to him and asked him his name and what year he was.
“I’m a freshman,” Davis replied.
“That was pretty much the extent of the interaction,” Davis says now, “but it felt like I had done something good.”
Around that time, the Cal track coaches called him in for a meeting and told him they wanted to put him on scholarship. But, they added, that would mean he could not play football.
Davis thought about the offer but didn’t immediately decide. He remembered what he wrote in that sixth-grade art project, and in the intervening years had a lot of people telling him he was just going to be a scout-team punching bag. “But in my head,” Davis says, “I knew that I would rather be a scout team player or a dummy and do what I do and I love every day, than be an all-American in track all the time.”
Davis’ maternal grandfather, Roger Mahutga, cherishes his grandson’s depiction of his life goals. (Courtesy Ashtyn Davis)
Davis said he’d need to talk to his parents first.
“At that point, I was like, maybe track is the way to go just because I didn’t want to put that burden on my parents, who were gonna have to pay my way through school, if there was a way out,” he says. “But them and my grandpa were like, ‘We will find a way to make this work. We’ll take out loans, whatever we need to do in order to afford you this opportunity to try to pursue what you love.’ ”
If NFL scouts wonder about the source of Davis’ determination and focus, they need to head to The Compound. For all of the great memories Davis has of growing up there, he has made it through some devastating times.
Sean Davis and Ashtyn’s mom, Christine, were high school sweethearts in Santa Cruz. He was a senior. She was a freshman. He came back into town after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, was going for his masters to become a college professor and was the frontman for a popular Bay Area alternative rap band, Code III. They opened for Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine and Body Count. “We lasted about five years in the mid-’90s,” Sean Davis says.
Christine was one of their biggest fans. “I told my friends, we’d make cute kids,” she says.
They got married, bought a trailer on the land in Bonny Doon that her dad had purchased, had Ashtyn and then 18 months later had his sister Lexi. But Sean’s life had been spiraling out of control in the wake of his father’s death.
“I didn’t want to face the fact that my father had died,” he says. “The band had broken up. I’d dropped out of grad school, and she was gonna rescue me.”
Sean had been a recreational drug user, but his issues escalated into methamphetamine and then crack cocaine. The couple got divorced after seven years of marriage.
“It got pretty bad,” Christine says.
Addiction also had been an issue for Ashtyn’s maternal grandfather in the 1980s. “My dad is an ex-addict with methamphetamine,” Christine says. “He was only 15 when I was born. It was crank in the ’80s. He was pretty deep for six or seven years. Ashtyn has a lot of heavy addiction in his family.”
For a 5-year-old Ashtyn, it was hard to process what was happening with his family, especially with his dad. “I just knew something was up,” he says.
Christine says, “Ashtyn, who was always very attached to his dad, didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to talk to him. A lot of stuff that Ashtyn remembers, I didn’t know he remembered. He was like 5. He shared a lot in the last couple of years that I thought he had been shielded of. He wanted his dad to be there. He remembers him coming to functions and he was either under the influence or kids would tease him because his clothes smelled like smoke.
“Ashtyn is really hard to get to open up. I asked him if he wanted to go to counseling. He says that’s what drives him. That’s why he’s always been so adamant about no drugs, no alcohol, no anything. He knows he has an addictive personality. He’s addicted to adrenaline clearly.”
Ashtyn always had a penchant for risk-taking, whether it was doing crazy aerial stunts on motorcycles or backflips off the cliffs at Lighthouse Point near the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where there’s an old posted sign warning visitors that 100 people have perished from leaping from that point and drowning, often from not understanding the directions of the tide.
“It did worry me when parents were sending me videos of him jumping him off a cliff,” she says. “I trusted him for the most part. But I’m not saying it didn’t scare me, because I would seriously wait for that text to come. He’s always been hard to deter from pushing the boundaries.”
The one thing Ashtyn has never risked was getting involved with alcohol or drugs, he says.
“In high school, something that I struggled with was a lot of people would be smoking and drinking for the first time,” he says. “And I always knew that I wanted to stay away from that stuff because of my peers, because of my dad.”
Sean Davis was homeless for 10 months in 2008 because of his addictions. He tried once to get sober but fell off after four months. The second time he went through a seven-day detox program but says that didn’t take at all. The third time he was different.
“I’ve been sober since Oct. 20, 2008,” Sean Davis says. “Ashtyn’s birthday is Oct. 10. I missed his 11th birthday. I’d never missed either one of my kids’ birthdays. And I was so out there this time, I didn’t even know it happened.”
Christine, who had gotten re-married, called and cussed him out.
“She told me that she didn’t care if I ever saw my kids again and if I needed help to call my mom, because I had not shown up for my kids,” Sean remembers.
“That hit home pretty hard. I ended up calling my mom right after I talked to her. My mom said, ‘If you show up at my house tomorrow sober, I’ll get you in a treatment center one more time.’ That’s what I did, and ever since then I stayed connected and started doing the work.”
What changed that time, he says, was that he actually did the work — working the 12 steps of recovery, having a sponsor, being of service and staying connected to his support group. Davis would sometimes bring Ashtyn and Lexi with him to his meetings.
Sean has spent the past decade of his sobriety as an arborist. He’d actually started climbing trees 20 years ago for work when there was a lull in his construction jobs, helping a guy down the street who ran a tree service. He had two near-tragic falls, one from 30 feet up and another from 40 feet up that left him with a dislocated hip, a broken wrist and a compound fracture of the elbow. He was high on the job. Since getting sober, he’s had to re-learn how to climb trees. Now, he has his credentials and is more on the administrative side. But sometimes he still climbs, going up as many as 200 feet. He says there’s nothing like that adrenaline rush.
The adrenaline craving runs in the family. But Ashtyn has harnessed it in constructive ways. Sean Davis is proud to say that the only time he ever got called by the police for his son was when Ashtyn was out past curfew as a designated driver taking his drunk friends home.
“That’s where he got a lot of his trust from me and his mom,” Sean Davis says. “He earned trust points that way because he wasn’t the guy that was going out drinking and wreaking havoc. He didn’t cut class. He always got good grades. Teachers loved him. Coaches loved him. Easy.”
In the indoor track season of 2017, his third in the track program, Ashtyn Davis made All-American as a hurdler. The following fall, he finally got onto the field for the football team, playing special teams as a gunner flying by everyone on the field. Davis earned the team’s special teams MVP award.
He also started the final three games at cornerback after Cal was rocked by a bunch of injuries. He had the length and speed coaches love in a cover man, but his technique was a mess. Then again, so was the Cal defense, which ranked in the bottom 10 in FBS. ****s was fired a month after the season. A new coaching staff came in, with head coach Justin Wilcox taking over. Former NFL defensive back Gerald Alexander was hired as the Bears’ secondary coach.
“I just felt like, here’s my opportunity,” Davis says. “I knew that everyone’s starting on the same level now. What am I going to do to be better?”
Alexander told his DB room that if anyone has questions, come up early in the morning. He wanted to be a resource to his players, and that it’s all voluntary.
Davis showed up the next morning at 5:30. They studied film together so Davis could better understand his plays. Davis kept showing up before dawn, and they would talk for an hour. Soon, he was switched from corner to safety. Alexander schooled him on the communications and the calls. They’d watch NFL film, the Bears’ spring film, anything the could get their hands on.
“It just opened up a whole new part of the game for me,” Davis says. “I see it so much differently now. I was able to play fast. Something just clicked for me.
“In high school, it was line up at 10 yards and either follow their best player or tackle the running back. That’s what the defense was for me. Once GA (Alexander) showed me this aspect of football, I fell in love with the game again. There’s so much more to it than people realize. It’s awesome. I’m high on that right now. At safety I can notice, ‘Okay, this guy’s split is a little tight. He might do this based on film study and stuff like that. There’s so much more to it that I feel like I can do if I’m willing to put the work in, and I can get so much better at that than I can at corner.”
He got his first start at safety on Oct. 13, 2017, against No. 8 Washington State. On the Cougars’ first play from scrimmage, Davis shot through from his safety spot to make a big stick on a running back. The defense was in Cover 4, and he just read his keys, saw the down block and knew the ball was coming his way. It was at that moment, he says, he felt validated.
The Bears stunned Washington State that night, winning 37-3. Davis finished the season with 33 tackles and an interception and, again, was the Bears’ special teams MVP after ranking ninth in the nation in kick return yardage. That’s also the season he was put on scholarship.
In 2018, Davis was the cornerstone for one of the nation’s top defenses as the Bears had a breakthrough under Wilcox. Davis picked off four passes and made 56 tackles and was named first-team All-Pac-12.
Davis had the first of five pass breakups in the 2018 season opener and finished the season as the Bears’ third-leading tackler. (Matt Cohen / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Davis has become a film junkie. A typical Saturday night for him would be to drive down to off-campus apartment of Cam Bynum and Elijah Hicks, Cal’s starting corners, and spend three hours geeking out on NFL cut-ups. “If we’re watching a team that is not us, we’ll usually watch a team that runs similar schemes to us,” Davis says. Washington is similar, he says. Wisconsin, where Wilcox had previously run the defense, is similar. They also watch a lot of the 49ers, Chargers and Seahawks and the 2017 Jaguars.
Davis’ stock in NFL personnel folks’ eyes has soared in the past year. Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy has a Day 2 draft grade him. “Big fan. Love his smarts and range,” Nagy said this week. The Athletic’s Dane Brugler has him rated as the No. 37 prospect and No. 2 safety in the 2020 draft.
Alexander is even more effusive: “He has tremendous top-end speed. This kid is different than anybody I’ve ever been around. He has the size, speed and physicality, and his ceiling is so high because he has only been playing safety for a season and a half. He has shown the ability to tackle in space, he can cover and he makes plays with great range when the ball is in the air.”
Davis will graduate soon with a double major in legal studies and social welfare, a major he says he pursued because “I just knew I wanted to help people.” He’s thought about going to law school but says he knows he would get antsy sitting behind a desk. Now, after football, he has a different idea. He’d like to become a firefighter, partly inspired by a job fair he attended in the spring.
“They had all of these professional round tables and I thought, I’m going to go to the table that looked the happiest, and they looked like the happiest dudes,” Davis says. “I started asking them questions, and it sounded like something I would enjoy.”
But the dream that Davis wrote about in sixth grade about making it to the NFL also seems very plausible. Last year when he wrapped up his track career at Cal by qualifying for the NCAA championships for the first time, he turned down agents who were hoping to get him to go pro in that sport. His parents, along with his sister Lexi and Christine’s husband Bob, will road trip, together, to every game this season, which might seem odd unless you’ve been to The Compound.
“My parents get along really well,” the defensive back says. “They’ll drive eight hours to games together. It’s kinda bizarre to me, but I’m so thankful that they get along like that because I know it’s not usually like that.”
From left to right, Ashtyn’s friend Nick Nolan, father Sean Davis, Ashtyn, mother Christine Mahutga-Cohen, grandfather Roger Mahutga, cousin Rachel Mahutga, sister Lexi Davis and stepfather Bob Cohen. (Bruce Feldman / The Athletic)
The bond between Davis’ parents is a unique one that probably has a lot to do with their son’s outlook, one that stems from Christine’s understanding of addiction from her own parents and the break-up of their marriage.
“We made an agreement to always put the kids first, even if I was super sick,” Sean says. “She always presented that to the kids and me being sick, and not as me being a deadbeat or a bad person. It was ‘you’re dad’s sick.’ No matter our problems, we don’t bad-mouth each other to the kids. We deal with each other. It’s a really unique relationship, and we’ve sacrificed a lot. It involved both of us swallowing a lot when we don’t want to for the sake of the kids.”
Says Christine, “People think it’s really weird, but we agreed long ago that it’s really important for both the kids to have that foundation because that is what’s best for them. As a kid, I felt torn between both parents and I never wanted our kids to feel that way. I always reassured them that he loved them. That was big for me in trying to change the pattern.”
Three years ago, Ashtyn and his sister showed up at their dad’s house on the anniversary of his eight-year sobriety.
“Dad, we have something to show you,” they said.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Here, look.”
They each rolled up their sleeves and showed him they both got the exact same tattoo on the inside of their wrists depicting mind, body and spirit, protected by God, and honoring his sobriety date in Roman numerals.
“I was super overwhelmed by it,” Sean says. “At first I was kinda scared because they put the date on it, which means it’s kinda solidified. If I start drinking again, I’ve ruined three wrists. I told her, why would you put the date on there? She says, regardless of if you drink again or not, that’s the day we got our daddy back. The next day I went down and got my own version of the same tattoo.
“I share it as part of my story. I’m in recovery. I get choked up, even when I just said it now — the day we got our daddy back — is hard to even utter that without welling up. It makes it worth it. I never lied to them about who was I was or what I came from. I think I get to be a signal of strength and inspiration and hard work just by staying sober and being honest about it.”
It was Ashtyn’s first tattoo.
He now has a sleeve of them on his right arm.
“All of Ashtyn’s tattoos have deep meanings,” Christine says, “but he won’t share them. They all have meanings but no one knows.”
“We have ideas,” his sister chimes in.
“We speculate,” Christine says.
Weeks later, his mom mentions something Wilcox said at Pac-12 media day, that her son is finally started to come out of his shell this year. In high school whenever he won awards, he’d always accept them looking down, Christine says. She’d encourage him to hold his head up. She thinks coming from a broken home contributed to that, and that seeing the issues with his father also caused him a lot of insecurity. None of that seemed “normal”, whatever exactly that was.
“This is really the first time I’ve seen him open up about who he is and where he comes from,” she says. “I’ve definitely seen a change in the more confidence he gets. This whole process and those coaches, Gerald, have been really good for him.”
It’s another sign of the continued growth of a person and player who started so small but with such big dreams.
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Rivals reporter is predicting that DJ Daniel starts over Tyson Campbell at corner.
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ATHENS, Ga. -- Georgia held its fifth practice of the week on Friday, donning shells (helmets and shoulder pads) on the Woodruff Practice Fields. Reporters were allowed to see about seven minutes of the workout and below Dawgs247 shares the news and notes from the field.
- Freshman inside linebacker Nakobe Dean, who has been battling an undisclosed injury, was back on the practice field today. We watched him go through drills and it appeared to be without limitation. He wasn't limping for taking any reps off during that period. Dawgs247 first noticed the absence of Dean before last Saturday's scrimmage, meaning he missed at least five practices.
- Sophomore offensive lineman Jamaree Salyer is still missing in action. Dawgs247 saw Salyer at the Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall on Wednesday using crutches and wearing a walking boot on his left foot. Kirby Smart told reporters after Wednesday's practice that he expects the Pace Academy product to return soon.
- Freshman running back Kenny McIntosh was absent during the media-viewing period. Some players are starting to wear scout-team jerseys in preparation for Vanderbilt but I didn't notice a number in that group that didn't belong.
- The Bulldogs were giving the quarterbacks and receivers some practice throwing and catching a wet ball. During the routes on air period, student assistants were dipping each football in a bucket of water before flipping it to the quarterback to simulate a shotgun snap.
Stetson Bennett IV really appeared to be struggling during this drill, missing wide of the mark on two of the three throws we saw. Jake Fromm connected on all three of his opportunities and so did D'Wan Mathis. Walk-on quarterback Nathan Priestley had one pass sail high.
When UGA's quarterbacks went back to a dry ball, Fromm and Bennett were both really sharp but we didn't really get to see Mathis and Priestley throw it. Fromm went seven of seven in the period overall. Bennett hit all four of his tosses with the dry ball.
We also saw a really nice catch from George Pickens, who reached down and caught a pass from Priestley off his shoe tops on the dead run. He was able to catch the low throw, and quickly burst up field.
14COMMENTS
- At one point during the routes-on-air period, the tight ends were working in the slot where position coach Todd Hartley was lining up with arm pads trying to jam the tight ends. Charlie Woerner and John FitzPatrick blew right by him but Eli Wolf delivered a loud pop to Hartley's left arm and knocked him off balance, leading to some loud praise from the first-year UGA assistant coach.
- We weren't able to tell who it was but a walk-on wide receiver was wearing Vanderbilt standout Kalija Lipscombs No. 16. Redshirt freshman wide receiver was wearing No. 87 and playing the role of 6-foot-4, 210-pound wideout Amir Abdur-Rahman.
- Freshman inside linebacker Nakobe Dean, who has been battling an undisclosed injury, was back on the practice field today. We watched him go through drills and it appeared to be without limitation. He wasn't limping for taking any reps off during that period. Dawgs247 first noticed the absence of Dean before last Saturday's scrimmage, meaning he missed at least five practices.
- Sophomore offensive lineman Jamaree Salyer is still missing in action. Dawgs247 saw Salyer at the Butts-Mehre Heritage Hall on Wednesday using crutches and wearing a walking boot on his left foot. Kirby Smart told reporters after Wednesday's practice that he expects the Pace Academy product to return soon.
- Freshman running back Kenny McIntosh was absent during the media-viewing period. Some players are starting to wear scout-team jerseys in preparation for Vanderbilt but I didn't notice a number in that group that didn't belong.
- The Bulldogs were giving the quarterbacks and receivers some practice throwing and catching a wet ball. During the routes on air period, student assistants were dipping each football in a bucket of water before flipping it to the quarterback to simulate a shotgun snap.
Stetson Bennett IV really appeared to be struggling during this drill, missing wide of the mark on two of the three throws we saw. Jake Fromm connected on all three of his opportunities and so did D'Wan Mathis. Walk-on quarterback Nathan Priestley had one pass sail high.
When UGA's quarterbacks went back to a dry ball, Fromm and Bennett were both really sharp but we didn't really get to see Mathis and Priestley throw it. Fromm went seven of seven in the period overall. Bennett hit all four of his tosses with the dry ball.
We also saw a really nice catch from George Pickens, who reached down and caught a pass from Priestley off his shoe tops on the dead run. He was able to catch the low throw, and quickly burst up field.
14COMMENTS
- At one point during the routes-on-air period, the tight ends were working in the slot where position coach Todd Hartley was lining up with arm pads trying to jam the tight ends. Charlie Woerner and John FitzPatrick blew right by him but Eli Wolf delivered a loud pop to Hartley's left arm and knocked him off balance, leading to some loud praise from the first-year UGA assistant coach.
- We weren't able to tell who it was but a walk-on wide receiver was wearing Vanderbilt standout Kalija Lipscombs No. 16. Redshirt freshman wide receiver was wearing No. 87 and playing the role of 6-foot-4, 210-pound wideout Amir Abdur-Rahman.
Rivals reporter is predicting that DJ Daniel starts over Tyson Campbell at corner.
Three Observations:
1. Big talent brings big egos. I doubt anyone has complaints about Kirby Smart and his ability to recruit. He has a staff of heavy hitters who are bringing 5-stars to Athens as if they were fishing with a car battery. But what happens when those players, who have coaches from all over the nation fawning all over them, arrive at Georgia and are forced to be just like everyone else on the team? In other words, these kids are told they are special. They are lavished with praise. Recruiters kiss their butts and coeds kiss everything else. Then they have to go to study hall? Run steps like the plebs who were not No. 1 or No. 2 at their position? Turn in equipment?
No, that’s not for me, but for thee.
The big challenge for Smart and Co. is not landing the top players, but rather deprogramming those players’ recruitments. Most of the time, it works. It takes a while, but you’ll see players all of a sudden buy-in and pull with the rest of the team. A real pride envelops them. BIG TEAM, little me.
But then you have the kids who think UGA is just a holding area until they are whisked off to their rightful place in the first round of the NFL Draft. Those players are cancer. And they have to be removed before their entitlement attitude spreads. Smart did so earlier this year with one player. While it hurt the team to lose him, I think it will make Georgia and said player both better in the end. It also serves as a warning to a few others who think they are smarter than the coaches. No one is bigger than the team, no matter how high your ranking was.
2. It’s my fault. So, on Saturday night I wrote down a quick outline of what I wanted to write for this 3-2-1 report. My second item was that, aside from the above dismissal, it has been a quiet fall camp. No day by day harping over a quarterback position battle. No obvious issues among the wideouts or defensive line. No hand-wringing over scrimmage stats or the lack therein. No gut-punch injuries like Zamir White’s. No tales of fights at practice. No arrests….dammit.
3. Get out more. I was so desperate for the return of college football that on Saturday morning I actually tuned into College GameDay. It was just in time to see Desmond Howard apologize for quoting Wayne Brady, which is sad because that may be the only time I have ever laughed at the show. Anyway, they went on to predict the winners of the SEC, and Howard picked UGA. Corso and the others picked Alabama. Fair enough. But the reasoning caught me off guard.
They said they had been to Alabama in the offseason and the Tide players were mad. They had a chip on their shoulder after losing to Clemson. No, in fact, it was a boulder. Nick Saban is mad. The players have something to prove and so forth.
Did any of those guys on the stage at Disney World visit Athens in the offseason? Do they really believe Kirby Smart isn’t mad enough to chew dynamite-covered barb wire after losing to a backup quarterback twice? Do they think Jake Fromm is content to be No.2 in the SEC, always respected but not thought of as good enough to beat the Tide? I'm sure the Tide players are hungry to get back to the title game. But if they are hungry, the players in Athens are starving.
Two Questions:
1. Can Georgia’s offensive line live up to the hype? It’s true I have never seen an offensive line group like this one. I have covered some great lines in my 26 years, but athletically this group is tops. Until next year maybe. That said, I have two concerns.
A) The first team deserves all the hype it’s getting, except in obvious passing situations in which they've struggled against good teams. Their run blocking and RPOs are fantastic.
B) The fall-off from first to the second team is a bit more pronounced than many have assumed. With Jamaree Salyer out for a while, there is only one top backup. Cade Mayes or Ben Cleveland will be the No. 6 guy. That’s an important role (see Mays and Trey Hill last year). After that it gets murky. Clay Webb has great potential. But he, like many of the others, is inexperienced. Justin Schaffer is good, so too are Owen Condon, Xavier Truss, Warren McClendon, Warren Ericson, and D’Marcus Hayes. But that list is full of guys who have not taken a snap or have taken very few.
Maybe those guys are brought along in the first games and are ready to step in if needed. Last year the new guys were thrown into the fire repeatedly and fared well. Keep your fingers crossed you don’t need to find out.
2. Who will return kicks and punts? Georgia has a lot of options here. I expect Tyler Simmons will be the punt returner. He has good hands and makes good decisions. Plus Simmons is one of the fastest guys on the team. As for kickoffs, look for James Cook and Demetris Robertson to be back there waiting for the ball. I would not be surprised to see Kearis Jackson or Dominick Blaylock in the mix for punt returns as well. Also, Brian Herrien and Simmons could be back for kickoffs to give Georgia a more experienced return duo.
One Prediction. Or three:
1. I predict we are going to see a change at cornerback. Juco transfer DJ Daniel has had a great fall camp. His talent and experience have enabled him to make a move on Tyson Campbell. This is a tight race, but I expect Daniel will be the starter for the first game. Understand that both players are good, so this situation will be fluid all year as they battle back and forth. We don’t get to see a lot of practice but in the time we are out there, secondary coach Charlton Warren often praises Daniel. One day he told the rest of the cornerbacks to “do it like this guy,” pointing to Daniel.
In case you missed it. I predicted a few weeks ago that Mays will start ahead of Cleveland. Now we are seeing the line go through reps that way.
Steven Nixon, the grad transfer from Mercer, will start at the long snapper spot. Most folks don’t realize Nixon is living out a lifelong dream to play for the Dawgs. I expect he will win the spot. Still, it feels weird not naming a Theus or a Frix as the starter there.
1. Big talent brings big egos. I doubt anyone has complaints about Kirby Smart and his ability to recruit. He has a staff of heavy hitters who are bringing 5-stars to Athens as if they were fishing with a car battery. But what happens when those players, who have coaches from all over the nation fawning all over them, arrive at Georgia and are forced to be just like everyone else on the team? In other words, these kids are told they are special. They are lavished with praise. Recruiters kiss their butts and coeds kiss everything else. Then they have to go to study hall? Run steps like the plebs who were not No. 1 or No. 2 at their position? Turn in equipment?
No, that’s not for me, but for thee.
The big challenge for Smart and Co. is not landing the top players, but rather deprogramming those players’ recruitments. Most of the time, it works. It takes a while, but you’ll see players all of a sudden buy-in and pull with the rest of the team. A real pride envelops them. BIG TEAM, little me.
But then you have the kids who think UGA is just a holding area until they are whisked off to their rightful place in the first round of the NFL Draft. Those players are cancer. And they have to be removed before their entitlement attitude spreads. Smart did so earlier this year with one player. While it hurt the team to lose him, I think it will make Georgia and said player both better in the end. It also serves as a warning to a few others who think they are smarter than the coaches. No one is bigger than the team, no matter how high your ranking was.
2. It’s my fault. So, on Saturday night I wrote down a quick outline of what I wanted to write for this 3-2-1 report. My second item was that, aside from the above dismissal, it has been a quiet fall camp. No day by day harping over a quarterback position battle. No obvious issues among the wideouts or defensive line. No hand-wringing over scrimmage stats or the lack therein. No gut-punch injuries like Zamir White’s. No tales of fights at practice. No arrests….dammit.
3. Get out more. I was so desperate for the return of college football that on Saturday morning I actually tuned into College GameDay. It was just in time to see Desmond Howard apologize for quoting Wayne Brady, which is sad because that may be the only time I have ever laughed at the show. Anyway, they went on to predict the winners of the SEC, and Howard picked UGA. Corso and the others picked Alabama. Fair enough. But the reasoning caught me off guard.
They said they had been to Alabama in the offseason and the Tide players were mad. They had a chip on their shoulder after losing to Clemson. No, in fact, it was a boulder. Nick Saban is mad. The players have something to prove and so forth.
Did any of those guys on the stage at Disney World visit Athens in the offseason? Do they really believe Kirby Smart isn’t mad enough to chew dynamite-covered barb wire after losing to a backup quarterback twice? Do they think Jake Fromm is content to be No.2 in the SEC, always respected but not thought of as good enough to beat the Tide? I'm sure the Tide players are hungry to get back to the title game. But if they are hungry, the players in Athens are starving.
Two Questions:
1. Can Georgia’s offensive line live up to the hype? It’s true I have never seen an offensive line group like this one. I have covered some great lines in my 26 years, but athletically this group is tops. Until next year maybe. That said, I have two concerns.
A) The first team deserves all the hype it’s getting, except in obvious passing situations in which they've struggled against good teams. Their run blocking and RPOs are fantastic.
B) The fall-off from first to the second team is a bit more pronounced than many have assumed. With Jamaree Salyer out for a while, there is only one top backup. Cade Mayes or Ben Cleveland will be the No. 6 guy. That’s an important role (see Mays and Trey Hill last year). After that it gets murky. Clay Webb has great potential. But he, like many of the others, is inexperienced. Justin Schaffer is good, so too are Owen Condon, Xavier Truss, Warren McClendon, Warren Ericson, and D’Marcus Hayes. But that list is full of guys who have not taken a snap or have taken very few.
Maybe those guys are brought along in the first games and are ready to step in if needed. Last year the new guys were thrown into the fire repeatedly and fared well. Keep your fingers crossed you don’t need to find out.
2. Who will return kicks and punts? Georgia has a lot of options here. I expect Tyler Simmons will be the punt returner. He has good hands and makes good decisions. Plus Simmons is one of the fastest guys on the team. As for kickoffs, look for James Cook and Demetris Robertson to be back there waiting for the ball. I would not be surprised to see Kearis Jackson or Dominick Blaylock in the mix for punt returns as well. Also, Brian Herrien and Simmons could be back for kickoffs to give Georgia a more experienced return duo.
One Prediction. Or three:
1. I predict we are going to see a change at cornerback. Juco transfer DJ Daniel has had a great fall camp. His talent and experience have enabled him to make a move on Tyson Campbell. This is a tight race, but I expect Daniel will be the starter for the first game. Understand that both players are good, so this situation will be fluid all year as they battle back and forth. We don’t get to see a lot of practice but in the time we are out there, secondary coach Charlton Warren often praises Daniel. One day he told the rest of the cornerbacks to “do it like this guy,” pointing to Daniel.
In case you missed it. I predicted a few weeks ago that Mays will start ahead of Cleveland. Now we are seeing the line go through reps that way.
Steven Nixon, the grad transfer from Mercer, will start at the long snapper spot. Most folks don’t realize Nixon is living out a lifelong dream to play for the Dawgs. I expect he will win the spot. Still, it feels weird not naming a Theus or a Frix as the starter there.
dacomeup
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