Cal’s Davis proving he’s more than multitasking track athlete
Ashtyn Davis is a football player.
He is also one of the best highhurdlers in the nation.
For most of his Cal career, those first two sentences were transposed, but with each thrilling kick return, each ranging play in coverage and each bone-rattling hit, the junior safety is changing that perception.
“I love it, because I’ve been trying to shake that stigma for 3½ years of just being a track guy who wanted to come up and play football,” the 6-foot-1, 190-pounder from Santa Cruz said. “Really, football was always my passion.”
Davis is third on the country’s 16th-ranked defense with 48 tackles, and is among the nation’s top 15 in interceptions (four) and kick-return average (26.5 yards). In Saturday’s 33-21 victory over Colorado, he picked off two passes (one he returned 35 yards for a touchdown), but his best play might have come on the Buffaloes’ final pass.
Steven Montez tried to freeze Davis in the middle of the field at his post-safety spot by looking left, but as the quarterback reloaded to throw to the right, the All-America hurdler showcased his track speed. Davis bolted from the middle of the field to break up the 45-yard pass intended for Juwan Winfree outside the numbers.
“That’s as good a play as he’s made. The interceptions were critical in the game, but you watch him come out of the post right there, and that’s what a post-safety does. I mean, the amount of ground that he covered and then tipping the ball away, that’s a big-time play,” Cal head coach Justin Wilcox said. “I’d love to say that’s (coaching), but that’s all Ashtyn.”
It took Davis a while to persuade anybody that he was capable of making such plays. With no scholarship offers out of high school, he decided to run at Cal and try to use track as a platform to the football field.
When he got on campus, he started doing internet searches for contacts and discovered that assistant athletic director of football operations Andrew McGraw was a fellow alum of Santa Cruz High.
Six emails later, Davis got a meeting. The meeting netted a tryout. The tryout earned a jersey.
At first, Davis, who generally played offense in high school, was stationed at cornerback, but by his own admission, he wasn’t really playing any position.
“All I really knew was to not the let guy in front of me catch the ball,” he said. “I didn’t know much about scheme and playcalling. I just did what I was told.”
When Wilcox, defensive coordinator Tim DeRuyter and defensive backs coach Gerald Alexander arrived in in January 2017, they moved Davis to safety. He started meeting Alexander at 5:30 or 6 a.m. and devoured the nuances of the game.
After an impressive sophomore season that earned him the J. Scott Duncan Award given to the squad’s Most Valuable Special Teams Player, Davis was told by coaches that he could skip the spring game to compete in a track meet.
“He had his spring schedule already set up, because if you’re an elite-level, two-sport player, we’re going to work with him on that,” Wilcox said. “But as we were coming up on the spring game, he comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, do you think I could play?’ ... I was like, ‘Of course!’ I was doing a double-take, because I’ve never heard that before. He’s one of the best high-hurdlers in the country, and he’s begging to play in the spring game. … He comes out and tackles everybody, and then runs down there to run the high hurdles. Just that’s the type of guy he is.”
On his first interception against Colorado, Davis immediately recognized “2-3 Dagger,” the same play on which the Buffaloes had gashed the Bears a year ago. He didn’t chase the first receiver who ran in front of him, knowing the quarterback would be looking for the following receiver on a dig route and jumped in for the pick.
“Before it seemed like I was just relying on physical tools. I was almost robotic,” Davis said. “Now, it’s more of a chess match. I love it when you’re able to show something and bait the offense into something, maybe running right into a blitz or throwing into a cloud corner.
“It makes it so much more fun when you’re playing the game within the game.”