CB Jaden Davis hit the freshman wall, but Alex Grinch has 'been impressed' with him in 2020
Midway through his first college football season, Jaden Davis looked up and took a deep breath.
“I felt like I hit a wall last year,” Davis said.
That’s not uncommon for freshmen upon whom much is placed. Davis, Tre Brown and Parnell Motley finished the 2019 season as Oklahoma’s only scholarship cornerbacks. Motley was a senior last year. Brown is a senior this year.
For Davis, who played in all 14 games and got one start, it was a little overwhelming.
“Yeah, I think at times, I think he probably was content in playing,” defensive coordinator Alex Grinch said Wednesday on a video press conference. “I think maybe midway through the year, we kind of accused him of that, as opposed to just trying to get better week in and week out. And that’s what, a lot of times, young players do: you kind of accept your role, you’re excited that you have a role, and I don’t know that we — from Game 6 to Game 10 — saw a jump as a guy who’s played a lot of football for us.”
Jaden Davis (4) vs. Texas
Joshua R. Gateley / OU Athletics
Pat Fields is a junior safety who watched Davis hit that wall last year — and then eventually climb over it. Fields, the Sooners’ lone defensive captain this year, said he experienced the same thing. He played in six games as a backup in 2018, and when he won the starting job in 2019, he found himself struggling with it all.
“Definitely,” Fields said. “I think that’s a part of everybody’s career and I kind of had points in time where I was like that, toward the beginning of the season last year, trying not to make mistakes and just playing to not mess up.”
The 5-foot-10, 185-pound Davis, a former 4-star prospect from Fort Lauderdale, FL, is a starter now — at least, he started the season opener against Missouri State — and he has taken to the coaching from Grinch and cornerbacks coach Roy Manning. He’s also embraced Grinch’s harsh critiques, because he knows, like Grinch, they’re brutally honest.
“I believe he is exactly right,” Davis said. “I felt like I hit a wall last year, in that I got into my head and started thinking more instead of playing. When I first got here and first stepped onto the field, it was all about making plays, making plays. But I felt like as I got to that wall — I felt like I hit that wall in game six or seven — that it was less about making plays and more about not making mistakes.”
Said Fields, “I think the wall that Jaden’s talking about with trying not to mess up and things like that, we all kind of had points last year where we were at that point.
“I think that’s one of the biggest growths that our whole secondary has had from last year to this year. Everybody is a lot more confident in what we’re doing. We’re confident in our technique. We’re confident in being aggressive and we’re daring guys to beat us. We know that, of course in football, we don’t want to, but there’s going to be those plays where you get beat every once in a while, but it has to be a perfect throw. It has to be a perfect catch in order for them to beat us.”
Grinch said that was “a major emphasis point” during the offseason, truncated and uneven as it was.
“Even into fall camp,” Grinch said, “ ‘OK are you coming back as a guy that’s gonna fight to be a starter in this program? Or are you content with just being the guy that kind of had a limited role as we went through things?’
“And so I will say this, in the last couple weeks, I’ve really been impressed with him: a guy that I think certainly showed some flashes last year of being a quality corner in this conference and the guy that we need to be one for us this year.”
With upperclassmen like Brown at the other corner and Fields, Delarrin Turner-Yell and Brendan Radley-Hiles at safety, Davis is able to see evidence of what Grinch and Manning have been teaching him. The OU secondary made immense strides last year, and most everyone says similar growth has occurred this year.
Maybe for none more so than Davis.
“I felt that I’ve attacked this year, just going out there and making plays,” Davis said. “… I’m trying to make an impact because I’m trying to make a career in this game.”
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