COLUMBUS, Ohio — If it was simply because of his father’s ties to Ohio, then Wyatt Davis’ affinity for Ohio State would have made sense. Duane Davis, a college football player turned actor with roles in films like “The Program” and “Little Big League,” was born in Cleveland. Heck, he even played Columbus native Buster Douglas in an HBO movie about Mike Tyson.
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Ohio connection? That’s the secret ingredient in a lot of the commitments the Buckeyes get from out of state. Someone’s parent is from Ohio, or a grandparent went to Ohio State. There’s usually something.
Not with Davis. At least it’s not that obvious. Duane lived in Cleveland for the first two years of his life, and then moved to Wisconsin when his father, Pro Football Hall of Fame defensive end Willie Davis, heard on the radio one day while riding in a Cleveland taxi that he had been traded to the Green Bay Packers. Willie Davis is from Louisiana. Duane Davis could hardly talk by the time he left Ohio. They’re not Buckeyes.
Yet …
“Wyatt was a Buckeye,” Duane Davis toldThe Athletic this week,“and had been for a long time.”
Why, then, did a kid from Los Angeles powerhouse St. John Bosco have so much love for Ohio State?
David Davis, Wyatt’s older brother and a former defensive tackle at Cal, was a huge Jim Tressel fan. He came by it organically, watching the 2002 national championship team and following the program from there. When David was in elementary school, he wrote a book report on Tressel’s book “The Winners Manual: For the Game of Life.”
He became a Buckeye, and that rubbed off on Wyatt.
“It was kind of a random thing,” David said. “I just remember always following them.I think that had a lot to do with it, and the status of the program. I remember (Wyatt) watching the 2014 national champions. He kinda liked how they got after people.”
So thank that championship team, and thank Tressel, for where Ohio State stands now heading into Saturday’s Big Ten Championship against Northwestern. Because of a brother’s random love for Tressel Ball, and the lingering impact of Urban Meyer’s third national title, the Buckeyes landed the nation’s No. 1 guard in the 2017 recruiting class. With Demetrius Knox out with a foot fracture, Wyatt Davis will make his first career start this week in Indianapolis.
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The former five-star prospect has played sparingly this year, with a few snaps of mop-up time and a quick turn as a jumbo tight end against Nebraska a few weeks ago. This is different. Knox is a senior and is out for the rest of the season. Davis figured to be a starter at Ohio State next year anyway. Now his career is starting in earnest.
“It’s unlimited,” Meyer said when asked to reflect on Davis’ potential. “He’s that good of a person, from good people, which is a great place to start. Very talented, and he’s a tough guy. Those are all characteristics of people that have nice careers here.”
Davis is joining the mix at an interesting time, though.
Ohio State’s offensive line is coming off its best game of the season. It allowed no sacks, no quarterback hurries and only four tackles for loss to a Michigan defense some fancied the best in the country coming in. Against a defensive line that has a couple of disruptive pass rushers in Chase Winovich and Rashan Gary, quarterback Dwayne Haskins was kept clean and shredded what was the nation’s No. 1 pass defense.
It was a master class in pass protection. Michigan came after Haskins, because that’s the only way to try to slow him down. Other defenses had more success, but the Buckeyes’ offensive line walled up last week, showing what it looks like when a group is well-prepared and playing totally in sync. Tackles and guards worked in combination, passing off rushers to one another while having answers for most of what Michigan threw at them.
“I think it was a really good performance,” right tackle Isaiah Prince said. “There’s no way our offense puts up those type of numbers without our offensive line playing the way that we did.”
And now there’s a challenge for Ohio State in throwing in a new starter up front.
Prince and Knox, the right side of the line, had started next to each other for 20 games before Knox went down in the fourth quarter, with 52 seconds left, against Michigan. They spent even more time practicing next to each other during Prince’s freshman year, when he and Knox were part of the second-team offensive line. You develop a comfort when you play that long next to someone. When you watch the way the line played in lockstep against Michigan, you see how important that continuity is.
There was a thought last spring that Prince would move over to left tackle after two years of starting on the right side. Part of the reason that didn’t happen is because offensive line coach Greg Studrawa didn’t want to break up Prince and Knox.
Prince has played some next to Davis, and more this week now that Davis is officially a starter, but to think there won’t be an adjustment would be naive. There’s a reason that Ohio State’s best offensive lines have seemed to get rolling as the year has gone along. You play together long enough, you start to figure out the guy next to you, when he needs help and when he can handle things on his own.
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It’s kind of a dance, and Prince suddenly has a new partner.
“You gotta kinda get a rhythm for the guy you’re playing next to on the offensive line,” Prince said. “But me and Wyatt did a great job during practice getting prepared as best we can for this game. I think he’s more than capable of getting the job done. So I think we’ll be fine.”
Meyer probably wouldn’t have agreed with that six weeks ago.
There was a point in the middle of the season when it felt like Ohio State could use some offensive line shakeup. The run game wasn’t working and teams were getting after Haskins a little bit.
“We didn’t want to disrupt the flow of the five guys in there,” Meyer said.
To the credit of the five players who started the first 12 games of the season, they put up back-to-back performances against Maryland and Michigan that showed real growth. Even if the coaching staff had decided to make a change, the solution wasn’t obvious. Branden Bowen, a starter last year, was still on the mend from a broken leg. Brady Taylor, a fifth-year senior, was coming off a knee injury. And Davis was still trying to figure some things out.
“Typical big dudes when they get here it takes them a minute. It took him a long minute to fight the fatigue factor,” Meyer said. “He’s always been a tough guy, but now he’s a finisher. It’s fun to watch him play.”
Davis always had talent. He was a three-year starter at Bosco, got his first offer from Alabama, was a U.S. Army All-American and has better football bloodlines than most.
Duane played at Missouri before turning to acting. Willie is one of the greatest defensive linemen to ever play and won five championships with Vince Lombardi’s Packers. Had sacks been an official stat kept when he was playing, Willie Davis would have had well over 100 during his 10 seasons in Green Bay.
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That’s a valuable resource, so when Wyatt and David were in high school, they would send game film to their grandfather.
“My first high school game I thought I had this great game, couple sacks, couple tackles,” David said. “I remember sending it to him thinking, ‘He’s gonna love this.’ The first thing he said is, ‘You had this many loafs, not running to the ball.’ So that was really good to get his perspective and insight.”
For Wyatt, it went a step further. He was able to get inside the minds of the defensive linemen he faced by absorbing the wisdom of someone who had built a Hall of Fame career as a defensive end.
Still, Davis went through the growing pains most freshmen go through when he got to Ohio State: Big dreams of playing early quickly followed by the crushing reality that college ball is a little more difficult than it is in high school.
“Wyatt has never been one of those kids that’s just happy to be there, you know? He really expected to contribute his first year, and it was disappointing,” Duane said. “He got through, and then he had great expectations for this year, and didn’t meet his goals. It’s been a tough two years.”
Things started to change around the time Ohio State lost to Purdue.
Meyer started to talk about Davis more, the way he typically talks about young guys. Meyer often says players are coming on, pushing for playing time. “He’s close,” Meyer will say. But “close” often just means “we think he’ll be good in the future,” and makes fans long even more for some of the young talent on the roster to crack the rotation. It rarely actually happens.
It kind of happened with Davis, though. He played a handful of snaps against Nebraska when Ohio State unveiled a new jumbo three-tight end look with Luke Farrell, Jeremy Ruckert and Davis (who briefly switched from No. 52 to No. 86) adding some extra blockers in short yardage. It worked well, though the Buckeyes haven’t gone back to that look since.
Still, you saw some of the flashes with Davis that Meyer had been seeing in recent weeks. You saw it again against Michigan for a brief stretch in the fourth quarter when Knox lost a shoe and had to come off the field for a few snaps. Davis went in, and they ran right behind him twice.
“He’s a rugged guy,” Meyer said. “And he’s been scratching and clawing for playing time ever since probably five, six weeks ago, and has been close.”
Now Davis is starting.
Good thing his brother wrote that book report.
Duane had a plan for Wyatt. They would take a couple of rounds of unofficial visits during his sophom*ore and junior years, narrow things down, make at least three official visits during his senior year, and announce a decision on National Signing Day. Duane figured it would come down to Alabama, Notre Dame or nearby USC.
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Meyer has a story he’s told about Davis a couple of times since he signed with Ohio State. The Davis family lives in the same Los Angeles suburb as USC coach Clay Helton. By the time Meyer learned that, he had already used up his in-home visit time with Davis late in the 2017 recruiting cycle. So he sent Studrawa to L.A., joking on signing day that he had his offensive line coach “out there from sunup until sundown to make sure no one goes by that house.”
The connection to Helton went deeper than that. Duane coached Helton’s son Reid in Pop Warner and at Palos Verdes High School. He would bump into Helton and his wife at Ralphs, the local grocery store. Helton, and USC, were unavoidable. There was a thought throughout Davis’ commitment that he might flip away from Ohio State and stay closer to home.
“He still gets hammered about that,” Duane said. “I get hammered about it.”
But Davis had his mind made up early that he’d go to Ohio State if given the chance. Duane thought that was a pipe dream.
“I told him, ‘Ohio State doesn’t come to California for linemen,’ ” Duane said.
Davis was in the summer before his senior year, with offers from just about everyone — except for the Buckeyes — when that chance finally came. Wyatt and Duane were getting set for one final round of unofficial visits that would take them to Michigan and Notre Dame. Asked whether there was anyplace else he’d like to visit, Wyatt said Ohio State.
He visited the Buckeyes on June 18, 2016, finally getting the offer he had long coveted, one he routinely told his father “would change the game” if it ever came.
As they were driving back to Chicago for a flight home to Los Angeles, Wyatt told his dad he wanted to go to Ohio State.
He called the OSU coaches from the car — on the same day of his first visit to Columbus — and committed.
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Davis was always a Buckeye, and now he gets to really live it.
“He is very excited. I haven’t heard that type of excitement probably since he played high school,” Duane said. “He’s always been somewhat of a cool customer, so I don’t think he’s intimidated by it. This is what he’s been preparing for, but to have that feeling of knowing that you’re gonna play is a great feeling. We just talked about being focused and his preparation. I feel like he’s ready.”
(Photo of Wyatt Davis:Scott Varley / Getty Images)
