When Florida announced the hiring of Corey Bell and Brad Davis as position coaches on the staff Saturday, a number of Gators fans were familiar with Bell's past resume and his work recruiting in south Florida at prior stops in FAU and USF.
Davis, maybe not as much.
Presumed to be coaching Florida's offensive line next season, Davis joins the Gators after spending the 2016 season with North Texas as its offensive line coach/run game coordinator and then the 2015 campaign with East Carolina as its offensive line coach. Prior to that, he served on James Madison's staff in 2014 and was at Portland State from 2009-13.
To gather some more information about Davis and his background, Inside the Gators spoke with two beat writers who have covered Davis in the past: PirateIllustrated.com's Mark Lindsay, who covered Davis at ECU, and North Texas beat writer Brett Vito of the Denton Record-Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News.
Both Lindsay and Vito answered a number of questions about Davis in the roundtable below.
How would you describe Davis’ time at the respective school you covered? How did the offensive line perform under Davis?
Lindsay: They got good output from the offensive line in the first half of the season. Not as much in the last half. This was the first year after Lincoln Riley left for Oklahoma. The Pirates played a pretty tough seven point 31-24 game with Florida in his only year at ECU in 2015. The Pirates won four of their first seven games including beating Virginia Tech and hanging 70 on UNC that year. They were ranked in the top 25 before losing four of the last five to close the season 5-7, as Ruffin McNeill was released.
Vito: Davis fared pretty well in a tough spot in his lone season at North Texas. The Mean Green made the move from a power running attack to the spread last season in head coach Seth Littrell’s first year. The big concern heading into the season among UNT fans was if the Mean Green would have enough wide receivers to run that type of system.
The better question turned out to be if the Mean Green had a line that could protect its quarterbacks.
