In a pandemic-battered year of heartache for FIU, Butch Davis’ love of coaching survives | Opinion
I last spoke to Butch Davis less than one year ago, although it seems much longer than that through the endless gauntlet of 2020. I had never seen him happier, then. His FIU Panthers football team had finally gotten the better of big brother, beating the Miami Hurricanes for the first time.
That meant Davis’ constantly overlooked, under-radar FIU had qualified for a third bowl game in his three seasons back in Miami. His was a program rising to always elusive relevance, beginning to matter in its own market.
Not quite one year later, Davis is a coach inside a team inside a pandemic. He is not alone in that challenge. But few programs have been hit harder or seen their season more strewn about by the coronavirus/COVID-19 plague that has now killed some 240,000 Americans.
He is a football lifer, Butch is. Since playing at Bixby (Oklahoma) High in the mid-’60s. This is his 40th season working a sideline at some level, small to big and back. He has never faced a year more wrenching.
I ask him how he’s doing.
“I’m on the right side of the grass,” he says, in that drawl that never left him. “Other than that, it’s been crazy. I’ve not had another season even remotely close to this. Nothing. Not at all.”
The Panthers, a Conference USA team, are 0-3, all close losses as FIU has struggled to replace NFL-good quarterback James Morgan, a fourth-round draft pick currently third-string with the New York Jets.
That’s almost a victory, though — that they have gotten even three games in.
Results are secondary. At some schools in 2020, a coach’s most important scoreboard is how many players have tested positive this week, how many are in quarantine, how many are available.
Davis has dealt with multiple outbreaks within in his team. He has had seven assistant coaches on his staff test positive, including his son, Drew, the tight ends coach.
“It’s unnerving when you know your own son has it,” Davis says. “Twenty days of isolation and quarantining. Trying to stay away from him while coaching with him.”
Davis’ wife has stayed at the couple’s residence in Naples this season to reduce her risk, “just because of my exposure to a huge number of players that potentially are positive [with the virus].”
Davis turns 69 later this month. He battled a cancer scare in 2007. Medical folks would call him at high risk.
Abundant caution and testing three times a week does not always prevent the spread.
“They have done everything we’ve asked them to do,” Davis says. “We’ve tried to create a bubble, copy like the NBA was.”
Seventeen players tested positive when the team returned to campus in June.
“That started the ball rolling downhill in a negative way,” Davis says.
In August the program dealt with a personal loss as beloved wide receiver coach Aubrey Hill passed away after a private fight with cancer.
The season was about to start — or to not start, thanks to COVID.
Two opponents, Old Dominion and UMass, were dropped from FIU’s original 2020 schedule when they decided to not play this fall.
The early season game at UCF was postponed (and will not be made up) because it was scheduled before the Orlando school had OK’d their season to safely start.
Four other games have been postponed or canceled because the pandemic or perhaps-related injuries have left FIU’s roster too thin to field a proper team. The latest was this Saturday’s game at UTEP. Davis and his team should be headed for the airport Friday, bound for El Paso. Won’t happen.
“You try to keep the kids emotionally upbeat, but you read it in their face,” Davis says. “They’re disappointed. They’re sad.”
One postponed game has been replayed and two others rescheduled, They will get in eight games, if they’re lucky, with home games on campus limited to 2,500 — including the band.
A full, healthy college roster should have 85 players. Davis has had closer to 47 available some weeks, due to coronavirus or injuries in addition to four players opting out.
One week, FIU had three healthy, available offensive linemen.
“I moved two defensive line kids over so we could practice,” Davis recalls.
FIU as lost 14 players to season-ending injuries, and Davis wonders if some of that toll is due to pandemic-related restrictions.
“Nothing makes me feel sicker or sadder for those kids,” Davis says. “Because you think maybe that would have never happened if we’d had spring practice of full conditioning in the offseason. The Pac-12 are playing their first weekend now. In retrospect, I wish that had been us.”
Playing in a pandemic has foisted uncertainty onto a professions that wants anything but that.
“Jimmy Johnson or Don Shula or Pat Riley — coaches love consistency and routine, ‘This day means that,’” Davis says. “This year we’ve had none of that. Only uncertainty. And unless there’s a vaccine or something, I don’t see it being any different next year.”
Butch Davis’ career has been a football atlas.
He followed Johnson from the Hurricanes to the Dallas Cowboys, won two Super Bowl rings, returned to head coach the Canes from 1995 to 2000. Coached the Cleveland Browns, North Carolina, now FIU. Wanted to come back to UM, but the university hired Mark Richt instead ... which made beating Miami last fall all the sweeter.
Now, about to turn 69, the football lifer is not pondering retirement.
“I don’t think of that,” he says. “I try to act like I’m 38 years old. I enjoy the kids.”
This pandemic year, his toughest season of any, has not had the power to rob Butch Davis of the joy he still gets from coaching. That is a victory that won’t show up in any records, but it’s his.
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 10:12 AM.
