KevinCosio
Sophomore
- Joined
- Jan 13, 2014
- Messages
- 710
I think it's increasing every day Butch becomes our HC, here's an article just posted on CS, I wanted to share with that was done literally a couple of hours ago:
Butch Davis is not interested in somebody else's job anymore. It is open now and it is real and it is right in front of him every waking moment. And no, he can't stop thinking about it, can't stop reliving what happened in Coral Gables 15 years ago, the horrible mistake that he made, how it ever happened, how it probably changed college football history and what it has meant to his career and his life in general.
The head coaching job at Miami.
"All of my success leads back to Miami," Davis says. "All of it. Every last bit."
Let's qualify success.
Davis won a national title as an assistant coach to Jimmy Johnson with the Hurricanes in 1987. He was the defensive coordinator of back-to-back Super Bowl champions in 1993 and 1994 after he joined Johnson with the Dallas Cowboys. He returned to The U and built one of the greatest rosters in college football history in his six years as head coach at UM from 1995-2000 before the Cleveland Browns caught him at a weak moment, frustrated over months of contract negotiations that hadn't reached a conclusion, and lured him with a $15 million check.
Davis was forced to resign in the midst of his fourth year in Cleveland, a fate most NFL coaches eventually meet, and then tried to create the Miami magic at North Carolina beginning in 2007. But he was fired there too because of an academic scandal he insists he knew nothing about. He was cleared of any wrongdoing in 10 different investigations by both North Carolina and the NCAA and it was found that the academic fraud amongst athletes was going on for 14 years before Davis even got there. Yet he was sent packing anyway because someone had to be and they didn't really care that he had built one of college football's best rosters yet again in Chapel Hill and that they were tearing the program back down to its core.
So success has a bit of emptiness to it. The chancellor who terminated him called Davis to have breakfast a year later and apologized. It didn't really matter.
Carolina has never recovered and to a degree neither has Davis, who has worked in television but has not found it to be a true substitute for the adrenaline rush of coaching. It has been frustrating. He doesn't hide it. So that word "success" must be qualified by the void in Davis' head coaching resume as he sits there performing his TV gig every weekend for ESPN.
And now the Miami job is open and it is taunting him. His phone doesn't stop ringing. Former Canes players. Coaches who want to be on his staff. Reporters. They all want to talk about Miami, but Davis hasn't spoken to anybody at the University in years.
He is 64 now, the days ticking by, time disappearing before his very eyes if he ever is to get one more opportunity to put an exclamation point on those 40-plus years in the football business.
And yeah, now it truly is right there. Al Golden was fired Sunday night and by Monday morning that meant Davis could finally talk about Miami with the clear conscience that he is not violating any unwritten codes of the coaching profession. You don't go after someone else's job.
"I would love to be considered," Davis said in an exclusive interview with CaneSport on Monday night. "I want to coach. I miss coaching, I miss the kids, I miss the competitiveness of it.
"I have 11 1/2 years invested at Miami. There are so many emotional ties in that community ... church, friends, high school coaches. I think people respect the job I did. I think people respect what we did for the kids who came to play with us.
"I wouldn't say I have been thinking about Miami every day, but I clearly have thought about Miami a lot. There have been many times I wished I still had that job. You can't rewrite history. But you can write a different ending to the story, that's for **** sure."
Fan polls show that Davis is the overwhelming favorite of the fan base and South Florida sports community in general to land the Miami job. People can't stop talking about him. You look at what has been going on at Michigan and the rock star status that Jim Harbaugh attained by going home and it is not hard to imagine the similar excitement that a Davis hiring would generate in Coral Gables and how it might resonate in environs far beyond.
The Miami search committee and athletic director Blake James won't be able to hide from the loud cries for Butch. And he is sitting there on the other side of the state in Bonita Springs waiting for someone to call his agent, Jimmy Sexton, and ask to talk to him. The drive from Bonita to Miami takes an hour and 45 minutes. You can be certain that trip if it ever happens would take an hour and 15 for an interview in Coral Gables.
I put it in those terms to Davis and we shared a laugh. We have a long history. I remember how we used to spend an hour on the phone every Tuesday night orchestrating an online chat with the very fans who are clamoring for Davis to return today. They would ask the questions, I would relay them to Davis and would type their responses on an electronic message board. Like everyone else, I felt deceived when Davis left for the Browns. Davis had told me only hours earlier, just like he told recruits, friends, administrators and everybody else, that he wasn't going anywhere.
What exactly happened between him and Paul Dee and why that new contract that was talked about for months never got done was one of the few topics that was off limits in our conversation Monday night that stretched beyond an hour. Davis is not interested in burning bridges. Not then and not now. He takes total blame for the colossal mistake that ended his time at Miami. And now with the job open, and him sitting there available on the other side of the Everglades, he is hoping enough time has passed that the University will consider him a legitimate candidate for this job again.
And if he gets an interview, watch out. For the better part of that hour, I listened to a man primed to blow the doors off of an interview room. He has a vision. He has passion. He is energized about the staff he thinks he can pull together and what he might be able to leave behind when it is time to retire. He is receptive to helping mold the individual who would eventually replace him. I mentioned the names Cristobal and Chudzinski, both expected to be candidates for the head job, as possible candidates for a coach in waiting role if Davis were to return to Miami and Davis didn't blink for a second.
"It would excite me," he said. "I think I can absolutely do the job. I think I am a better coach today than I have ever been. It would be a great place to finish my coaching career, build a team to win the national championship and when it is time to leave be judged by what I am leaving behind. I wouldn't be trying to go to the Independence Bowl.
"There is absolutely some unfinished business in my career and there is no better place to finish that business than at Miami."
Davis can envision himself as an architect as much as a coach, setting the program up for years.
That idea of developing coaches? He has the resume to substantiate his confidence. People were distracted by all of the great players Miami produced when Davis was coach. But nobody realized how great the coaches were that were teaching them every day.
Greg Schiano and Chuck Pagano went on to become NFL head coaches. Curtis Johnson and Larry Coker and Randy Shannon became college head coaches.
"I may have had more success grooming coaches than players," Davis said. "If I were to be fortunate enough for Miami to be interested in me, I am going to put together a staff of young, aggressive guys who can coach their butts off and recruit their butts off and build that program to sustain itself."
In his TV roles, Davis has traveled the country and visited programs like Notre Dame, Utah and Michigan to study how they approach things and stay current with the game. He feels could be a better coach today than he has ever been and that supersedes any concerns about his age.
The coaching world has been littered with very accomplished guys who got old and lost their edge. Bobby Bowden had to be forced out at FSU at age 80. Mack Brown was run out of Texas at 63. Frank Beamer could be headed toward a similar fate at Virginia Tech at 69.
"I'm the same age as Nick Saban," Davis said. "Would you hire Nick if you could?
"Age is just a number. I've been the biggest kid on my block all my life. I have all the energy, feel the same as when I was 45. I think one of the things that ends up hurting coaches as they get older is that they hate recruiting. The recruiting crushed them. I absolutely love recruiting, love the challenges and the battles, the competitiveness and the importance of it. Let's be honest. I want to have better players than the other team."
There is a common philosophy in football coaching that you can't go back where you have been before. That's the reason you rarely see coaches who have success at one school and leave return back to that school. Nick Saban left LSU where he won a national title and returned to the college game at Alabama. Urban Meyer left Florida where he won two of them and resurfaced at Ohio State.
There were hard feelings when Davis left Miami back in February of 2000 and there is a chance he might not get that call that he is waiting for. There are no guarantees right now that he will even get an interview.
Davis had looked so many people in the eye and told them that he wasn't going anywhere. They believed him. They knew what Davis and Miami were on the cusp of accomplishing. The Hurricanes got screwed out of the national title game that 2000 season and had an absolutely stacked team returning for 2001. Davis believed what he was saying himself. And then, just like that, he made an impulsive decision and just got up and walked away from it, took his 51-20 record over six years and packed his bags for Cleveland. People were crushed despite the fact that Miami played in the national title game the next two seasons with all of the players Davis left behind, many of whom are calling him daily right now and urging him to push hard again for the Miami job.
"It was just a horrible mistake," Davis said. "We might have won more national championships than Alabama is winning right now. I had coached at Dallas and I knew what the NFL is all about. The Cleveland Browns have only been in the playoffs once in the last 25 years and we took them there. But the owner died. We had a great relationship. And everything changed."
Through that turn of events, through what happened at Carolina, Davis had a lot of time to think about what might have been had he just stayed at Miami. He saw the decline of the program and that made it worse. He beat the Hurricanes three out of four years that he was the coach at Chapel Hill.
"Everybody always talks about me being a great recruiter," Davis said. "But at Miami, you had a chance to win a recruiting battle in every home you walked into."
He knows he can do it again and he probably can. If Miami passes on him, it's going to be a tough pass. The support for Davis among the fans and football alumni is overwhelming. Davis would reinvigorate the fan base unlike any other candidate. He would sell tickets. He would help raise money for that indoor practice facility that desperately needs to be built. He helped raise more than $100 million in his four years at Carolina. He would be committed to Miami football for the rest of his life. That's a lot for Blake James and the search committee to absorb and consider.
"You spend 11 years there and you have a lot invested in the community," Davis said. "There is not a school in the country that has that tight of a bond. If you are a Cane, you are a Cane for life.
"Hopefully my name will be one that gets the opportunity to be considered. Time will tell if that is a direction the school wants to go. But am I interested? Yes I am interested. Am I Jim Harbaugh and can I mean to Miami what he has meant to Michigan? I don't know. We don't put 100,000 people in the stands. But he never won any Super Bowls either.
"A lot of people are calling me and telling me that they are interested in me coming back. But right now, none of them have a contract."
Butch Davis is not interested in somebody else's job anymore. It is open now and it is real and it is right in front of him every waking moment. And no, he can't stop thinking about it, can't stop reliving what happened in Coral Gables 15 years ago, the horrible mistake that he made, how it ever happened, how it probably changed college football history and what it has meant to his career and his life in general.
The head coaching job at Miami.
"All of my success leads back to Miami," Davis says. "All of it. Every last bit."
Let's qualify success.
Davis won a national title as an assistant coach to Jimmy Johnson with the Hurricanes in 1987. He was the defensive coordinator of back-to-back Super Bowl champions in 1993 and 1994 after he joined Johnson with the Dallas Cowboys. He returned to The U and built one of the greatest rosters in college football history in his six years as head coach at UM from 1995-2000 before the Cleveland Browns caught him at a weak moment, frustrated over months of contract negotiations that hadn't reached a conclusion, and lured him with a $15 million check.
Davis was forced to resign in the midst of his fourth year in Cleveland, a fate most NFL coaches eventually meet, and then tried to create the Miami magic at North Carolina beginning in 2007. But he was fired there too because of an academic scandal he insists he knew nothing about. He was cleared of any wrongdoing in 10 different investigations by both North Carolina and the NCAA and it was found that the academic fraud amongst athletes was going on for 14 years before Davis even got there. Yet he was sent packing anyway because someone had to be and they didn't really care that he had built one of college football's best rosters yet again in Chapel Hill and that they were tearing the program back down to its core.
So success has a bit of emptiness to it. The chancellor who terminated him called Davis to have breakfast a year later and apologized. It didn't really matter.
Carolina has never recovered and to a degree neither has Davis, who has worked in television but has not found it to be a true substitute for the adrenaline rush of coaching. It has been frustrating. He doesn't hide it. So that word "success" must be qualified by the void in Davis' head coaching resume as he sits there performing his TV gig every weekend for ESPN.
And now the Miami job is open and it is taunting him. His phone doesn't stop ringing. Former Canes players. Coaches who want to be on his staff. Reporters. They all want to talk about Miami, but Davis hasn't spoken to anybody at the University in years.
He is 64 now, the days ticking by, time disappearing before his very eyes if he ever is to get one more opportunity to put an exclamation point on those 40-plus years in the football business.
And yeah, now it truly is right there. Al Golden was fired Sunday night and by Monday morning that meant Davis could finally talk about Miami with the clear conscience that he is not violating any unwritten codes of the coaching profession. You don't go after someone else's job.
"I would love to be considered," Davis said in an exclusive interview with CaneSport on Monday night. "I want to coach. I miss coaching, I miss the kids, I miss the competitiveness of it.
"I have 11 1/2 years invested at Miami. There are so many emotional ties in that community ... church, friends, high school coaches. I think people respect the job I did. I think people respect what we did for the kids who came to play with us.
"I wouldn't say I have been thinking about Miami every day, but I clearly have thought about Miami a lot. There have been many times I wished I still had that job. You can't rewrite history. But you can write a different ending to the story, that's for **** sure."
Fan polls show that Davis is the overwhelming favorite of the fan base and South Florida sports community in general to land the Miami job. People can't stop talking about him. You look at what has been going on at Michigan and the rock star status that Jim Harbaugh attained by going home and it is not hard to imagine the similar excitement that a Davis hiring would generate in Coral Gables and how it might resonate in environs far beyond.
The Miami search committee and athletic director Blake James won't be able to hide from the loud cries for Butch. And he is sitting there on the other side of the state in Bonita Springs waiting for someone to call his agent, Jimmy Sexton, and ask to talk to him. The drive from Bonita to Miami takes an hour and 45 minutes. You can be certain that trip if it ever happens would take an hour and 15 for an interview in Coral Gables.
I put it in those terms to Davis and we shared a laugh. We have a long history. I remember how we used to spend an hour on the phone every Tuesday night orchestrating an online chat with the very fans who are clamoring for Davis to return today. They would ask the questions, I would relay them to Davis and would type their responses on an electronic message board. Like everyone else, I felt deceived when Davis left for the Browns. Davis had told me only hours earlier, just like he told recruits, friends, administrators and everybody else, that he wasn't going anywhere.
What exactly happened between him and Paul Dee and why that new contract that was talked about for months never got done was one of the few topics that was off limits in our conversation Monday night that stretched beyond an hour. Davis is not interested in burning bridges. Not then and not now. He takes total blame for the colossal mistake that ended his time at Miami. And now with the job open, and him sitting there available on the other side of the Everglades, he is hoping enough time has passed that the University will consider him a legitimate candidate for this job again.
And if he gets an interview, watch out. For the better part of that hour, I listened to a man primed to blow the doors off of an interview room. He has a vision. He has passion. He is energized about the staff he thinks he can pull together and what he might be able to leave behind when it is time to retire. He is receptive to helping mold the individual who would eventually replace him. I mentioned the names Cristobal and Chudzinski, both expected to be candidates for the head job, as possible candidates for a coach in waiting role if Davis were to return to Miami and Davis didn't blink for a second.
"It would excite me," he said. "I think I can absolutely do the job. I think I am a better coach today than I have ever been. It would be a great place to finish my coaching career, build a team to win the national championship and when it is time to leave be judged by what I am leaving behind. I wouldn't be trying to go to the Independence Bowl.
"There is absolutely some unfinished business in my career and there is no better place to finish that business than at Miami."
Davis can envision himself as an architect as much as a coach, setting the program up for years.
That idea of developing coaches? He has the resume to substantiate his confidence. People were distracted by all of the great players Miami produced when Davis was coach. But nobody realized how great the coaches were that were teaching them every day.
Greg Schiano and Chuck Pagano went on to become NFL head coaches. Curtis Johnson and Larry Coker and Randy Shannon became college head coaches.
"I may have had more success grooming coaches than players," Davis said. "If I were to be fortunate enough for Miami to be interested in me, I am going to put together a staff of young, aggressive guys who can coach their butts off and recruit their butts off and build that program to sustain itself."
In his TV roles, Davis has traveled the country and visited programs like Notre Dame, Utah and Michigan to study how they approach things and stay current with the game. He feels could be a better coach today than he has ever been and that supersedes any concerns about his age.
The coaching world has been littered with very accomplished guys who got old and lost their edge. Bobby Bowden had to be forced out at FSU at age 80. Mack Brown was run out of Texas at 63. Frank Beamer could be headed toward a similar fate at Virginia Tech at 69.
"I'm the same age as Nick Saban," Davis said. "Would you hire Nick if you could?
"Age is just a number. I've been the biggest kid on my block all my life. I have all the energy, feel the same as when I was 45. I think one of the things that ends up hurting coaches as they get older is that they hate recruiting. The recruiting crushed them. I absolutely love recruiting, love the challenges and the battles, the competitiveness and the importance of it. Let's be honest. I want to have better players than the other team."
There is a common philosophy in football coaching that you can't go back where you have been before. That's the reason you rarely see coaches who have success at one school and leave return back to that school. Nick Saban left LSU where he won a national title and returned to the college game at Alabama. Urban Meyer left Florida where he won two of them and resurfaced at Ohio State.
There were hard feelings when Davis left Miami back in February of 2000 and there is a chance he might not get that call that he is waiting for. There are no guarantees right now that he will even get an interview.
Davis had looked so many people in the eye and told them that he wasn't going anywhere. They believed him. They knew what Davis and Miami were on the cusp of accomplishing. The Hurricanes got screwed out of the national title game that 2000 season and had an absolutely stacked team returning for 2001. Davis believed what he was saying himself. And then, just like that, he made an impulsive decision and just got up and walked away from it, took his 51-20 record over six years and packed his bags for Cleveland. People were crushed despite the fact that Miami played in the national title game the next two seasons with all of the players Davis left behind, many of whom are calling him daily right now and urging him to push hard again for the Miami job.
"It was just a horrible mistake," Davis said. "We might have won more national championships than Alabama is winning right now. I had coached at Dallas and I knew what the NFL is all about. The Cleveland Browns have only been in the playoffs once in the last 25 years and we took them there. But the owner died. We had a great relationship. And everything changed."
Through that turn of events, through what happened at Carolina, Davis had a lot of time to think about what might have been had he just stayed at Miami. He saw the decline of the program and that made it worse. He beat the Hurricanes three out of four years that he was the coach at Chapel Hill.
"Everybody always talks about me being a great recruiter," Davis said. "But at Miami, you had a chance to win a recruiting battle in every home you walked into."
He knows he can do it again and he probably can. If Miami passes on him, it's going to be a tough pass. The support for Davis among the fans and football alumni is overwhelming. Davis would reinvigorate the fan base unlike any other candidate. He would sell tickets. He would help raise money for that indoor practice facility that desperately needs to be built. He helped raise more than $100 million in his four years at Carolina. He would be committed to Miami football for the rest of his life. That's a lot for Blake James and the search committee to absorb and consider.
"You spend 11 years there and you have a lot invested in the community," Davis said. "There is not a school in the country that has that tight of a bond. If you are a Cane, you are a Cane for life.
"Hopefully my name will be one that gets the opportunity to be considered. Time will tell if that is a direction the school wants to go. But am I interested? Yes I am interested. Am I Jim Harbaugh and can I mean to Miami what he has meant to Michigan? I don't know. We don't put 100,000 people in the stands. But he never won any Super Bowls either.
"A lot of people are calling me and telling me that they are interested in me coming back. But right now, none of them have a contract."
