Jordan Davis is going to destroy your bracket
This guard might just give the Bears their one shining moment
WGREELEY» e’re suckers for a good origin story. Peter Parker, a radioactive spider and Uncle Ben. Bruce Wayne, Crime Alley and Joe Chill. Jordan Davis, a last-second loss and Joseph Austin. The kid’s 11. Inconsolable. A puddle of tears. His game’s a mess, the heart’s in pieces. Austin, his stepfather, walks over. “Do you want to get better?” Joseph asks the boy. “Yeah,” the boy replies.
“Do you ever want to feel like this again?’
“No.”
Cue the superhero training montage, the crunching guitar, the calendar days passing in the background like leaves in the autumn wind. A growth spurt that comes, but late. Rejections. False starts. Workouts at the crack of dawn.
“I wasn’t allowed to go to sleep without doing my 1,000 calf-raises and my 100 push-ups,” Davis, now a chiseled senior guard at Northern Colorado, recalls with a proud grin. “It was just stuff like that. And when I tell people that, they’ll be like, ‘Man, it sounds like your dad took it to the extreme.’ But that’s just how my dad knew that’s what I wanted to do, and, so he pushed me toward that.”
More calf-raises. More push-ups. More sit-ups. Before Azerbaijan, before Reno, before he was able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, Jordan Davis ached like sin.
“It was rough in the beginning,” Joe adds. “The first few times he talked about how sore he was every day. ‘Oh, my stomach hurts and my legs hurt.’ I said, ‘Dude, I can’t predict the future. I’m not a fortuneteller. You do this now, it’ll definitely pay off for (you) later.’” •••
We’re suckers for a good underdog. While the Nuggets have danced in the
NBA exosphere, the state of college basketball locally this winter feels more like a GIF of Sideshow Bob from “The Simpsons,” stepping on rake after rake in an infinite loop.
If you’re the sort of casual fan who starts paying more attention to NCAA hoops once the Super Bowl ends, well — you haven’t missed much.
Colorado (13-9, NCAA NET ranking of 83 as of late Thursday night) hasn’t been able to crash a Pac-12 race that’s turned into the West’s largest pillow fight.
Colorado State (9-14, NET: 190) is ironing out the growing pains of Year 1 of The Niko Medved Era.
The University of Denver (7-17 NET: 310) is teetering perilously close to its first 20-loss season since 2006-07.
Air Force (10-13, NET: 250) is fighting to avoid its ninth losing campaign in 11 years.
Barring a miraculous conference tournament run, Colorado’s Division I programs will be shut out of Bracketville for a third consecutive March and for the fourth time in five seasons.
But along the northeast corridor of the wasteland, one tiny daffodil blooms, alone, along 14th Avenue in Greeley. When ESPN’S Joe Lunardi dropped his first mock bracket of February, the projected first-round dance partner for Virginia — the top seed in the South and the first No. 1 seed ever to be felled by a 16 — had a familiar ring to it: Northern Colorado, 15-8 and trailing the top spot in the Big Sky Conference by a halfgame (9-3) at the start of the weekend.
How about that? The Bears, our UMBC. The Little Engine That Might.
“If he can uplift his team and get them to the Big Dance, he figures he can showcase this team on the big stage,” Joe says of his stepson, the Bears’ 6-foot-2 point guard and the nation’s No. 10 scorer (24.0 points per game). “And that’s all he ever wanted to do.”
The numbers don’t tell half of Davis’ story, but they tell the sexy half. After Saturday’s 65-59 victory against Sacramento State, he just 18 points from becoming UNC’S all-time leading scorer. He’s one of only two Bears to score more than 2,000 points since the program moved to Division I in 2006. He dropped 26 on No. 16 Texas Tech back on Nov. 24. Last March, he landed on the national radar at the Big Sky tournament in Reno when his onehanded slam in the face of 6-8 Montana forward Fabijan Krslovic got “Sportscenter” buzzing.
“He’s like a miniature Russell Westbrook,” UNC coach Jeff Linder says with a straight face. “There is no other Russell Westbrook in the world, but (Davis’) style of play is very similar to Russell Westbrook. His ability to attack the rim, his ability, at his size, to go posterize another team’s post player. His ability just to be relentless.
“And he’s a guy that stuffs the stat sheet. He’s not just a guy that goes and scores 25 points. He’s a guy that’s going to average five rebounds a game, and five assists, get a couple steals, get a couple blocks.”
Superheroes raise their games on the biggest stages, when we need them the most. In the preamble to the 2018 CIT championship game against Illinois-chicago, Davis came up to his coach with a knowing smile.
“I got this tonight,” Davis said. And he did, several times over: 29 points, eight boards, three assists in a 76-71 victory.
“And just see the look in his eyes, and just to have this confidence and then to go out and really put us on his back,” Linder says. “Even as good as (former UNC guard Andre Spight) was, really, (Davis) was the best guard on the floor that night.”
•••
We’re suckers for the dudes who back it up. Linder was drilling — and grilling — UNC freshman Bodie Hume on drives from the wing back in October when he decided to put the 6-2 Davis on his gifted 6-6 freshman.
“I’d get yelled at by Coach if I didn’t try to dunk it,” Hume recalls. “And then when he put JD on me and I never got a dunk. I’m not gonna lie: He blocked it every time.”
Hume figures he’s been stuffed by Davis at the rim over the last few months “probably 100 times already. I haven’t gotten him yet. I’ve laid it up, but I haven’t dunked on him.”
Those hops are part of the reason why No. 0 has dropped at least 20 points in a game 17 different times this season, even though he’s the first name on the opposition scouting report. At one point, those same reports said to foul him, that the charity stripe was Davis’ personal Kryptonite. As a sophomore and junior, the UNC guard only converted 61.9 percent of his attempts from the free throw line, the kind of rate that adds more points, late in a game, to a coach’s blood pressure than it does to the scoreboard.
But after talking with Linder, assistant coach Vinnie Mcghee and NBA scouts, Davis spent the summer tearing down the mechanics of his jumper like the exhaust system on an old Mustang, cleaning up years of grime and putting the pieces back in place, one at a time.
“It was about shooting a perfect shot; shooting a perfect shot one time, and then doing it again,” explains Davis, who went into the weekend toting an .818 clip from the stripe. “It took time. There were a lot of days I was frustrated, but you’ve just got to stick with the process.”
At minimum, it’s 300 shots per day. Make 10 in seven spots. Then make 10 at five spots. Then 30 free throws.
“So that’s 150,” says Davis, who’s shooting .808 from the stripe as a senior. “And I do it on both sides of the court.”
He and teammate Jonah Rodebaugh recently struck up a friendly wager: whoever shoots the worst from the floor out of the two of them by the end of the year has to do 100 push-ups for the other guy.
“It just creates this competitive fire,” Davis said, “that I feel like sometimes you need on teams.”
•••
We’re suckers for a curveball. At 5:30 a.m., Davis gets up to prepare for practice — the Bears’ women’s basketball practice. As part of his Sports and Exercise Science degree, he’s serving an internship as a student manager with the UNC women’s hoops squad. When the playing chapter ends, Davis says he wants to coach college basketball one day, to pay all those lessons forward.
“It kind of helps you see to learn about personalities,” Davis says. “Because I’m kind of a person — like you watch, in practice, I get after guys. I’m kind of intense. And there are times during the year where I struggle with how to handle different personalities. You know, you can’t go at everybody, yell at everybody. They’re not the same. So being able to work with the women’s basketball team allows me to learn how to adapt to personalities and how to get the best out of people.”
He’ll wipe sweat off the court. He’ll hold the dummies in practice. He’ll cheer lead. Heck, his curriculum even had him refereeing campus intramural 7-on-7 flag football games this past fall. Sometimes, he’d get recognized. One frat guy ambled up one afternoon feeling especially bold.
“Can I get your arm sleeve?” the kid asked.
“I need it for the season,” Davis countered.
“But I want to wear it out here. Just sign it and let me wear it. I promise I won’t dirty it.”
No dice, hermano.
“It was just weird,” Davis says with a laugh.
He’s done weirder. A precocious teen, Davis got under the skin of his principal at Findlay Middle School in Las Vegas once to the point where, in seventh grade, the shoe finally dropped.
“For me to stay out of trouble, the principal made me be the mascot of the basketball team,” Davis recalls.
And it wasn’t for a game; it was for the season. Findlay’s nickname is the Flyers; Davis was stuck donning a dog costume straight out of Snoopy’s Red Baron look.
“I was actually good, kids used to love me,” Davis said. “It was humbling because it showed me where I came in life. I came a long way from getting in trouble and it also showed me the progress that I made toward basketball. Not making the team made me hungry to make sure I’m staying out of trouble, I’m staying on top of my grades. It was definitely a humbling experience.”
•••
We’re suckers for the guys who see the big picture. On top of everything else, Davis is half-azer- baijani. Just not by birth. The short version starts with a caveat, as FIBA rules allow national squads one naturalized dual-citizen. An official with the Azerbaijan national team approached him through the UNC staff the spring after his sophomore season, looking for promising American guards under 21 who weren’t testing the NBA draft to try and buffer its roster for the FIBA U20 European Championship. Davis flew to the eastern European nation, became a dual-citizen, and managed to get himself serious face time with overseas scouts in the process.
“(Some foreign pro teams) have a player max of how many Americans you can have,” Davis explains. “So for me having dual-citizenship, I won’t be counted as an American: I’d be counted as a foreign player. So that also allows me to get paid more as well, because I wouldn’t be under an American (salary) cap … and it allows me to financially provide for my family.”
Davis’ daughter, Jordynn, turned 2 this past December. The new reason for all those shots, all those push-ups, all those calf-raises.
“In Jordan’s words, he said, ‘This is the biggest part of his life right now,’” Joe says.
The man’s not a fortune-teller. But wouldn’t it be perfect, after all those mornings, all those miles, if the tea leaves finally lined up? We’re suckers for a happy ending. One Shining Moment, the cherry on top of a life that’s tasted dozens already.
“I tell my staff every day: ‘We’ve just got to really enjoy these last 90-100 days of coaching him.’” Linder says. Then he grins. “Because, you know, you don’t come around kids like him very often.”
“If he can uplift his team and get them to the Big Dance, he figures he can showcase this team on the big stage.” Joe Austin, on his stepson, Jordan Davis