Beating the Hurricanes was huge for FIU. Why it was even bigger for Butch Davis | Opinion
This was in the merry, sonic bedlam of the FIU lockerroom after the biggest win in school history had been minted Saturday night at Marlins Park.
Butch Davis choked up Monday in the remembering, the retelling.
“The kids were dancing, cheering, high-fiving, chest-bumping,” he said of his Panthers players who had just stunned cross-county rival Miami, 30-24. “When we finally settled down...”
Davis’ voice hitched, cracked. It came out closer to a whisper as he resumed.
When the boisterous room quieted he looked at his players’ eyes and saw joy, saw pride, saw tears.
“When we finally settled down,” Davis said, “you looked into those kids’ eyes, their faces, and you saw what they had just accomplished. You saw it, knowing this night was going to stick with them for the rest of their lives.”
FIU had been 0-31 against Power 5 conference schools in its brief history including 0-3 against Miami before shocking college football as a three-touchdown underdog Saturday.
“We had no chance. No chance,” he said, of outside perceptions. “[The Hurricanes] would be playing their backups in the second half.”
Davis of course coached Miami under Jimmy Johnson in in 1984-88, and was UM head coach in 1995-2000. In the latter stint he won despite inheriting Dennis Erickson’s NCAA sanctions and scholarship reductions. He left for the NFL after an 11-1 season, all but gifting Larry Coker the 2001 national championship with players Davis had drafted.
Now, FIU will go to a bowl game each of Davis’ first three seasons, the streak a first for the 18-year-old program. He inherited a lot of losing but turned it around, with Saturday’s triumph a watershed.
For Panthers players, this was personal.
“Our kids had a chip on their shoulder,” as Davis put it. “I don’t think Miami recruited any of our kids, to be honest.”
It was personal for Davis, too. He helped win two Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys, but no win in his long career was bigger than Saturday’s for raw emotion.
UM has had more than one chance to hire Davis back over the years, including in late 2015 when he thought he had a real shot until Mark Richt quit at Georgia and UM quickly forgot about Butch.
Four seasons later plenty of disenchanted Hurricanes fans now wonder if UM chose the wrong ex-Cane to lead the program when it hired the former player Richt in December 2015 instead of Davis.
I won’t dabble in revisionist history here. Richt to me seemed the perfect hire at the time. Then again nobody anticipated him burning out and quitting after three seasons. Nor could one have predicted Manny Diaz stumbling this badly through his first year.
It is the clarity of hindsight that makes one ponder if UM would be better off right now with Davis 2.0 coaching the Canes in his fourth season back.
Instead the The U’s loss is FIU’s gain.
When the final score became real and the head coach got that cold orange Gatorade poured on his back, I will admit to an emotion that admittedly runs counter to the idea of the stoically impartial journalist.
I felt happy for Davis, OK? And for FIU.
The Hurricanes and their fans have enjoyed far more national championships and glory than most in college football (even as so many Canes fact act entitled, and treat losses like undeserved indignities).
It isn’t at all that I wished ill upon UM, or hoped they’d lose at Marlins Park.
It’s that this coach -- Davis, at age 68, after being passed over for the Miami coaching job Richt got -- was the man delivering such an emotional, watershed triumph to the program forever ignored in the Canes’ shadow.
I like a good story, and Davis beating UM was as storybook as it being FIU’s Anthony Jones scoring the clinching touchdown on a 37-yard run -- Jones, who barely a year earlier lay in a hospital after nearly dying in a random drive-by shooting in Opa-locka.
The team buses returned to campus Saturday night to a welcoming crowd of several hundred fans and revelers chanting and banging pots and pans.
Davis said he has gotten at least 300 congratulatory text messages since Saturday night, 30 or 40 from former Canes he coached.
He met with recruits and their parents Sunday on exquisitely timed official visits.
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Monday they held a “victory celebration” on campus. It was that big for this program.
“Oh by the way, now I’ve got try to watch some film on Marshall,” he said of this week’s regular season-ending opponent on the road.
“Awesome,” Davis is still calling the night, two days later. “So big for this program.”
Davis was 18 when he lost his mother to lung cancer. A year after that his football career ended with a blown-out knee at the University of Arkansas.
In 1993 Butch and wife Tammy’s infant son, Drew, nearly died from complications of whooping cough though he’d had vaccine against it, the baby spending two weeks in a hospital.
In 2006 Butch went through his own medical crisis, having a cancerous growth removed from his mouth.
Davis has been through a lot, and done a lot for football here, at UM and now FIU.
Even Canes fans should feel good for him.
Even Canes fans disgusted by Saturday’s loss should feel a little bit good for the coach who just beat them.
Postscript:
Davis gave a lift home after Saturday’s game to one of his assistant coaches who needed a ride.
It was Drew Davis, now 26, the son who’d almost died as an infant.
“I remember him sitting on my lap [in the ‘90s] while I was doing the Canes radio show. Who’d have believed then that someday I’d be coaching FIU against Miami,” Davis said. “These last three years at FIU have been the most unbelievable and enjoyable of my entire coaching career, because our family for the first time can all be together.”
This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 5:23 PM.
