The Wall Street Trick That Made Tyler Davis a Jacksonville Jaguar

New Jacksonville Jaguar tight end Tyler Davis is a Long Island native and Wall Street hopefully that used a stock market study method to become a NFL draftee.

When Tyler Davis was a kid growing up on Long Island in Bellmore, New York, he’d dream of the day he’d cross the East River and begin a career on Wall Street. 

He was, as he describes, fascinated by the stock market and how they could be charted. Even as a young kid, he would pour over the graphs generated each day and look for tendencies, any sort of pattern that would emerge that would indicate what the market would do next.

As a teenager, he became Mepham High School’s quarterback and he began college at UCONN at the same position. When the Huskies starter solidified his job, the coach came to Davis with a proposition that many a backup quarterback has heard but few actually accept despite the longterm benefits that Davis is now experiencing.

“Bob Diaco, came up to me and he said: ‘Tyler, you’re too athletic to be holding a clipboard on the sidelines, we need to put you somewhere,’” recalled Davis while on a call with local Jacksonville reporters after being drafted by the Jags in the sixth round on Saturday.

“So, he said what about TE, and at first, I was hesitant about it and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it since I was a QB my whole life. But I took it because I’m a team guy and I wanted to do what was best for the team. Ever since that day, I just worked as hard as I could to become the best tight end I could possibly be and it's crazy that we are sitting here now and I’m a new member of the Jacksonville Jaguars as a tight end.”

He became the best tight he could be the same way he’d learned as a kid. Studying the charts.

“I always just compared it to football because all you’re doing on the charts is just following a pattern and you’re looking for tendencies. That’s what I did as a kid, just looked at the graphs and tried to find tendencies in the graphs just like you do tendencies of a defense when starting at defense.”

He began studying Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, going back to Kelce’s time in college at Cincinnati. After winning College Football Performance Awards Tight End of the Year his senior season with the Bearcats, Kelce has gone on to play seven seasons with the Chiefs, winning a Super Bowl and becoming the first tight end in NFL history to record four consecutive 1,000-yard seasons.

“He’ll go down when he’s done as one of the greatest tight ends that has ever played this game. So of course, I try to emulate him and to be exactly what he does and study a lot of what he did the last year and just his whole career. I went back and started watching things he did at Cincinnati when he was back in college, just trying to be like him so I can see the comparison because I watch him myself. If I could be a little bit like Travis Kelce, I’d be a pretty good football player at the end of the day.”

By the time Davis had transferred to Georgia Tech, he had developed a work habit that mirrored his studies; patterns and tendencies to create a custom. He became a senior leader on the young yellow jackets team and finished with 17 receptions for 148 yards and one touchdown—an anomaly for a team that until recently didn’t even have tight ends since they were useless in the triple option offense ran at Georgia Tech. 

When he returned to campus in Atlanta earlier this year for his Pro Day (Georgia Tech was one of the few schools that conducted theirs early enough before shutdowns due to COVID-19) Davis saw his same habits and patterns shaping the next GT team.

“I come back, and a lot of the young guys are doing the things that I taught them about without me saying anything. Just seeing the impact, I had on those people, that’s what I do it for. That’s what this life is all about is making an impact on people, a positive impact on people. Those young dudes over there at Georgia Tech mean the world to me. They know that. I would do anything in the world for them. Literally anything. And going into a young team, I might be one of the youngest now coming in as a rookie. It will be an interesting perspective to see how things go, but like I said, I’ve been a part of a young team and I just can’t wait to see this side of it.”

Davis made an early impact on the Jacksonville Jaguars as well.

“The night before my Pro Day, I had about a 45-minute conversation with a scout for the Jaguars and I knew that they were pretty interested. He was interested to see what kind of day I was going to have. Then I had my Pro Day and I was lucky to get it in and he saw the numbers after he said we will for sure be in touch.”

Head coach Doug Marrone, and Long Island native himself, began looking into Davis as well and talked to some of his former players who went on to coach Davis at Georgia Tech and UCONN.

“I've got a kid that I coached when I was at Georgia Tech, went back and he’s a line coach there and loves him. A couple of other people: Corey Edsall, Randy Edsall’s son, was at Connecticut when he was there; we texted, [and he] really loved the kid. So I'm excited. He has a great opportunity in front of him. He has the ability to do it, and we'll see if he's good enough.

"He's from the South Shore. Guys that are from Long Island know the North Shore is the Gold Coast. The South Shore are the guys that are working. Now that conversation was interesting. I said, ‘You know, I'm from Throgs Neck in The Bronx.’ So usually people that live in Long Island, they’ve got to go over either the Throgs Neck Bridge or the Whitestone Bridge.’ So he's like, ‘Oh, that's awesome. You know that us guys from New York, we’re some mean son of a guns.’ And you can put in all the other words there. So I was like, ‘Alright! Pretty cool. We’ll see. We'll get a chance to see how mean you are when we get those pads on.’

“Outside of being a Met fan, you're pretty excited.”

Davis is back on Long Island now, training at home until he can arrive in Jacksonville when facilities reopen from quarantine. He’ll visit his favorite pizza joint—“I’m going to give Gino’s of Bellmore a shout out here, they deserve it”—and stand in his front yard to thank the parade of well-wishers driving past his house. And maybe he’ll even look across the East River and once again think of those future dreams in America’s capitalist capital. But for now, he’ll take those lessons that made him the first Tech tight end drafted this century and apply them to his other dram of being an NFL player with the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Hopefully I can play football for a good amount of time, you know, we’ll worry about that later on down the road…I’m just so happy that it ended up in Jacksonville.”