Why Detroit Lions LB Jarrad Davis is never satisfied just being OK

In nearly three decades as a high school coach in Georgia and South Carolina, Jeff Herron has never had a player work harder than Jarrad Davis.

“If you walked in our weight room, he was always the hardest working guy in there,” Herron said. “If you went to his classroom, he was always the hardest working guy in there.”

That’s why there was concern when Herron saw Davis dragging in the weight room  at Camden County High, in the coastal city of Kingsland, Ga.

Herron pulled Davis to the side and asked him if anything was wrong, and Davis, the 21st overall pick by the Detroit Lions in this week’s NFL draft, confessed he hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night.

“I said, ‘Well, what’s going on? Something bothering you or what?’” Herron recalled. “He said, ‘Well, I’m sleeping in the garage.’ I said, ‘Why are you sleeping in the garage?’ And he goes, ‘Well, my mom got mad I didn’t clean my room like she told me to so she moved me into the garage for the week.’ ”

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The only son of Amy and John Davis, Jarrad grew up in a disciplined household under the watchful eye of his mother, who helped instill in him the work ethic and leadership qualities NFL teams fell in love with during the buildup to the draft.

He was a team captain and two-year starter at Florida, where his linebackers coach said he had a Ray Lewis-like pull on the locker room, and a much more imposing version of Pied Piper at Camden County, where he led the Wildcats to the state quarterfinals as a senior while his teammates tried to emulate his every move.

“My dad was in the Navy. He wasn’t there for a long time and he was always just a phone call away,” Davis told the Free Press. “But just to have (my mom) there and for her to really teach me just how to be respectful to people, how to approach certain situations in life and how to handle certain things in an orderly manner, it rubbed off on me just so much and I can’t do anything but thank her for that.

“There’s nothing else I can do every day except for go to work for her because the things that she taught me in life, they’re priceless.”

Davis said he was a bit of a hellion growing up, though former coaches and childhood friends recall nothing of the sort.

His father was a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy, his mother worked long hours as a computer coder in the medical industry, and Davis said their work ethic set an example for him.

“(My mom) worked extremely hard and some days I came home and I was home alone for a couple hours,” Davis said. “Just being there, I got to really boss up and take care of myself. I can’t wait for mom to get home if I want to eat, if I’m super hungry. I got to make sure I take care of myself and I had to make sure the house was clean and everything. And there’s a certain standard that you have to live by, and she made me live by a standard each and every day whether she was there or she wasn’t there.”

Davis, at 6 feet 1, 238 pounds, said at his introductory news conference Thursday that his parents ruled with an iron fist and a leather belt.

“I was a hard-headed kid growing up so everything wasn’t peaches and cream my whole life," he said, "but at the same time there’s nothing that a belt can’t fix."

Asked later about the night he spent sleeping in the garage, Davis flashed a big grin.

“I was just being so lazy and lollygagging,” Davis said. “She started yelling at me and going crazy and I was so nervous, I was just scared to be in the house so I just went and slept in the (backseat of the car).”

Randy Shannon, Florida’s current defensive coordinator and Davis’ linebackers coach in 2015-16, said Davis’ selflessness as a player and desire to be great were traits instilled in him by his mom.

“Amy, she’s very competitive,” Shannon said. “She has a lot of energy, a lot of juice and a lot of factors where she don’t believe that anything can hold you down. And she don’t think that anything can ever hold him down.

“She gave him that confidence, that temperament that he has to just compete at all levels and never be satisfied with just being OK.”

Unwanted star

How Davis ended up at Florida is a story unto itself.

At Camden, he was part of a star-studded team that featured several Division I players. Quarterback Brice Ramsey, Davis’ classmate since first grade, signed with Georgia out of high school, and running back J.J. Green went to Georgia Tech (before transferring to Georgia).

Davis craved a Georgia offer, too, but once it became apparent that wasn’t going to happen, he committed to Auburn.

Late in 2012, after Auburn fired Gene Chizik as coach, the new Auburn staff made it known they were lukewarm on Davis’ prospects as a recruit.

Herron called then Florida coach Will Muschamp in an effort to get the Gators to re-open Davis’ recruitment, and Muschamp offered Davis a scholarship after it was clear one of his linebacker commitments would be a non-qualifier.

Davis gladly accepted – Florida and Georgia were his dream schools, Herron said – but Ramsey said Georgia’s lack of interest still served as motivation for his teammate.

“I really think that put a chip on his shoulder,” Ramsey said. “I’m almost positive if that offer was going to come through he was going to come to Georgia with me.”

At Florida, Davis played sparingly on defense his first two seasons, making two starts over two years before a knee injury ended his sophomore campaign.

Davis was Florida’s special teams player of the year as a freshman, and when Shannon came to Gainesville in 2015, he turned Davis loose as the team’s hard-hitting starting middle linebacker.

“He just wanted to play,” Shannon said. “You always want a player that wants to win, want a player that always wants to get better. You want a player that wants to learn how to be a team guy, and that was Jarrad.”

A longtime assistant with the Miami Hurricanes in the 1990s and early 2000s, Shannon said Davis reminds him some of Lewis, a future Hall of Famer who helped the Baltimore Ravens win two Super Bowls and was widely regarded as one of the best locker-room leaders of his era.

“There’s some similarities on the football field and things like that,” Shannon said. “But the energy (he’s going to bring to) the football team is going to be unbelievable. And I haven’t watched Detroit. I know Coach (Jim) Caldwell and everybody’s doing a great job, but he’s going to bring more excitement, more energy to the team, more competitiveness and just enhance what they got going on right now with the Lions.”

Davis made 98 tackles and 3.5 sacks in 12 starts as a junior, and was on pace to have an even better senior season before missing time with a high ankle sprain. He gutted through the injury to make seven tackles against Georgia, but it flared up the next week against Arkansas and kept him out of three straight games.

Shannon said Davis tried talking his way onto the field for the Gators’ rivalry game against Florida State late in the season, but wasn’t cleared medically to play. He returned hobbled for the Gators’ SEC championship loss to Alabama, then sat out Florida’s bowl game.

“He’s literally probably the only kid I’ve ever coached that we would have to take him out at practice on some days because he didn’t know how to go without being full speed,” Herron said. “He’d kill people. That’s just him. He does everything as hard as he possibly can and just has every intangible that you’d want and I’m thrilled to death that other people are starting to see that because we saw it very early on in him.”

'I love hitting'

For the last two years, during the week of the Georgia-Florida game, Ramsey said Georgia coaches would ask for his insight on Davis, his old high school teammate.

Neutralizing Davis was naturally a big part of Georgia’s gameplan, so much so that Ramsey said “that was all we worried about the whole week was the run game and if they were going to be able to get a hat on him.”

“There’s nothing I could tell (them),” Ramsey said. “I was like, ‘Look, I went to high school with him. He’s the same animal now only bigger.’ Literally, I told them he’s got one of the highest motors I’ve ever seen. He’s not going to stop. He’s relentless.”

As tough as Davis is on the football field, Ramsey said he once saw Davis brought to his knees – by the SlingShot amusement ride at OldTown in Kissimmee, Fla.

“He literally started passing out on the way up and was coming in and out of consciousness. It was crazy,” Ramsey said. “For a two-minute ride, I mean, yeah, it was kicking his ass to say the least.”

Davis showed his dominance during his four seasons at Florida, and the Lions are counting on him doing the same in Detroit.

General manager Bob Quinn said Davis can play either middle or weakside linebacker, and he’s expected to compete for a starting job the minute he steps foot on the practice field next month.

“It’s rare to see a guy with his size and bulk that can move like he moves,” Caldwell said. “He’s a guy that’s versatile. Certainly going to be able to play three downs for us as well. A fourth down if we happen to put him on special teams also, because he’s capable of that as well. But a guy that’s extremely well balanced in that area.”

Shannon said Davis is equally adept in run and pass coverage, and listening to Davis talk, there’s another element that should be a staple of his game.

Before he was one of college football's best linebackers, Davis was a peewee running back in his hometown — one who didn't like to get hit.

"I was nervous and scared," Davis said. "Loved running away from the defenders, but I got hit one time and after that one time of getting hit it’s like, 'Dang, do I really want to be doing this?' "

The answer, emphatically, after years of hard work at his parents' behest,  was yes.

“I love hitting,” Davis said. “I love striking people, I love just exerting force on another person. You can’t do it in any other way. You can’t do it on the street, you can’t do it at anybody’s house. You have to do it within the lines, within the paint. And it’s something that I chase while I play the game. I need that.”

Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!