Meet Rece Davis

In places like Muscle Shoals, Alabama, telling a story about college sports fandom is a socially acceptable way to talk to strangers about your family.

Davis has missed two Saturdays of work in over two decades at ESPN, both when his parents passed away; his mother, Janice, the day before Thanksgiving in 2002, and his father, Jerry, last September. GameDay, live from Tallahassee, aired a tribute with a picture of Jerry in a Crimson Tide hat and jacket. Alabama being what it is, the mourners watchedand then drove to the church to pay their respects, where Davis found out about the tribute. He was watching old DVDs of GameDay in a car last month when the tribute snuck up on him.

GameDay aired a tribute with a picture of Jerry in a Crimson Tide hat and jacket. Alabama being what it is, the mourners watched GameDay and then drove to the church to pay their respects.

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Jerry was an industrial machinist for the Tennessee Valley Authority, nicknamed "Iron Man" by Davis' father-in-law, both because he was never sick and twice rode his motorcycle from Tuscumbia, Alabama to Connecticut to visit his son's family. Jerry was once worried about his bike being stolen at a motel, so he drove straight through.

The way Davis talks about his father's brand of Bama fandom would seem apocryphal if there wasn't such a parallel between it and Davis' broadcasting style.

"He was what everyone says they want from fans but really don’t, because if they did, we wouldn’t have the over-the-top reactions. I guarantee you he never read a message board in his life. It wasn’t his style. But every Saturday he watched, and before that listened. I always joke that if all fans were like my dad, you wouldn’t have any message boards, you wouldn’t probably have sports talk and ESPN would only carry games. He did always love college football, but not in the stereotypical way of most Southern fans. He was a loyal fan, dedicated, but he didn’t agonize or complain or look for somebody to commiserate or celebrate with over Alabama."

When Davis' family lived just south of Muscle Shoals, Rece would stand at Jerry's vintage Grundig radio. He could pick up an LSU game on WWL in New Orleans or Georgia playing on WSB in Atlanta. This was how he heard Larry Munson call Herschel Walker's run over Bill Bates. He knew the voices; John Forney in Tuscaloosa, John Ferguson in Baton Rouge. The sound of Keith Jackson on the television dictated appointment viewing.

"I was afflicted. I was just eaten up with it from pretty much the very beginning. Some of my most vivid childhood memories have something to do with college football," Davis says.

He wrote a paper on sports broadcasters during his freshman year at Muscle Shoals High. He wanted to be the voice of Alabama or maybe the Braves. When he turned down the University of North Alabama and decided on Tuscaloosa, he was the first in his family to go to college.

He chose Alabama for its communications school, in part.

"Before I was old enough to know what a university was and all the things it offered, I knew about the football program. There’s no doubt that’s where my initial connection was made. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. When I heard several years ago that applications for enrollment at Virginia Tech went up after the Michael Vick era, I believed that."

Davis didn't join a fraternity, partially because he didn't drink, growing up in the Church of Christ. He formed friendships over sports as an R.A. at Paty Hall. Groups of friends would caravan to Birmingham for Bama games at Legion Field.

He interned at WCFT 33 in Tuscaloosa, then a CBS affiliate. For his first feature, he was dispatched to the mall to profile a chainsaw artist.

"It was awful. I was awful. Talk about a lack of awareness in your subject matter. The guy puts on the safety glasses and starts carving away at this stump, and before long he’s got a beaver, or whatever. I played it straight and talked about cutting angles, sharpness of the chainsaw. I don't think I have a copy of it. I hope I don’t have a copy of it. I went home excited and watched it and thought … 'Well, this stunk.'"

A lesson for his current promotion: sometimes levity is the way to deliver information.

***

"People ask me all the time how Rece is going to fit into the chemistry of the show," GameDay producer Lee Fitting says. "I don't know. We're not going to plan it. People ask me all the time how we built the chemistry for the show. I don't know. I really don't. It just works."

"You start planning things like chemistry, and it's over."

Fitting is a brash Long Islander who has massaged college football's provincial religions into the best live sports programming that isn't a game. Entering its 29th year, GameDay features everything: chalkboard analysis, celebrity guests, debates on off-field controversies, humor, weepy features, funny segments and local color provided by a new location each week. The cast's expanded, but the core's been Fowler, former Ohio State quarterback Kirk Herbstreit, former Indiana head coach Lee Corso and Heisman winner Desmond Howard.

"I'm amused by all this [attention to GameDay's operation]. If people saw what happened behind the scenes and how unstructured this all is ... we just go."

The script is built throughout the week, adjusted almost hourly, and then basically thrown out. Nothing is sacred. Fitting will cut a Tom Rinaldi feature if he has to (he hasn't yet). It's common for the Friday meeting to be shut down the moment Fitting feels the energy waning. On Saturday, he's in each talent's ear, pushing, pulling, reminding of conversations they had during the week.

Between bowties in The Grove at Ole Miss and Bill Murray bodyslamming Corso, Fitting estimates the show hit new peaks in the last two seasons.

"You don't get very many great moments on television. No one does. So when you get the moment, you get out of the way. You have to go with it," Fitting says.

That's the payoff of preparation, something each cast member publicly and privately fights. Fowler averaged three hours sleep a night on Thursday and Friday. Herbstreit describes his in-season schedule as "overdrive."

"If I'm not asleep or doing something with my family, it's prep work," says Herbstreit. "If you over-prepare and then really over-prepare, you can just talk. But in those four months, that's just constant."

"I would get depressed if we would miss something," Fowler says. "And there’s a lot of secrecy in this sport. These coaches guard secrets like they’re their military plans. To get through all that and tell people something they don’t already know is a challenge."

The real anxietynever comes from the grueling schedules or any hostile live environment. To ESPN talent, GameDay is a terrifying pop quiz of football knowledge.

"Fowler was inhuman. Just screw up once, man! Just once!"

-- Scott Van Pelt

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"This is a sport where you’ll get sniffed out by the fans if you don’t have a genuine passion. It’s a sport that you better not be making it up as you go, because as soon as those fans think you’re giving them bullshit, you’re tuned out," says Scott Van Pelt, who has worked as a correspondent for GameDay.

"[Fowler] was inhuman. Just screw up once, man! Just once! It’s astonishing to be that poised and deliver content that precise in chaos."

Davis is a veteran of football studio coverage and hosted the basketball incarnation of GameDay for years with Fitting in the truck. He hosted GameDay in 2006 when Fowler called the Breeders' Cup.

"Rece will do a tremendous job [with information]," Fowler says. "it’s a skill he has, and it’s a foundation he has after decades of being in the field and having been in the studio."

The work started months ago, with the same naive mission as Fowler before. In case, at any moment, there's a reference to any one of 130-plus programs' coaches, players or traditions, Davis wants the stat, the fact, the bon mot to complement an off-the-cuff remark and then transition. A team of researchers and producers backs the talent up, but no host would let his co-hosts think he or she needs a knowledge crutch.

"I am fearful of the prep," Davis says. "That’s the last thing you want, the lack of preparation to show. Everyone is going to misspeak, make mistakes, say whatever, one school when you mean another. Those are slips of the tongue, and you don’t like it, but you live with it. What you can’t live with are the statements that come from not being prepared. You’re scared to death of those."

Davis left Tuscaloosa for WRBL in Columbus, Georgia. One day, while submitting a press credential to Auburn, he pretended not to understand how to work a fax machine so he could strike up conversation with an ad department staffer named Leigh Langley, a former Auburn student. Davis proposed in August and took a job at WJRT in Flint, Michigan in September.

"My first assignment there was a high school football game and it started snowing, and I thought, 'What have I done?'" Davis says.

Leigh stayed in her hometown of Columbus until they married that December.

"I remember asking him what his goal was, and he told me he wanted to go to ESPN. And so I asked him, 'Then why are we looking at all these other cities?'" Leigh says.

"Because frankly I didn’t know what I was doing," her husband replies.

Davis found an ESPN talent scout and Alabama alumnus named Andrea Kirby.

"She immediately asked why I hadn't sent a tape. I thought I had to get to a bigger market, like Atlanta or Boston or Chicago. And just to show how different cable TV was back then, she said, 'You’ve got this all screwed up. If you get to Chicago or Atlanta, you’ll never go to ESPN. You won’t take the pay cut.'"

ESPN hired Davis in 1995 be an anchor on ESPN2's Sports Smash, part of the company's Generation X self-counterprogramming.

"I didn't have to wear a leather jacket, but the rule then was that if you wore a tie, no jacket, and if you wore a jacket, no tie. And denim was good. Denim was great."

Smash was cancelled a month after Davis arrived.

ESPN2 talent had been warned by management not to lobby for ESPN anchor slots. The brands were managed as separate entities, one traditional and the other young. So Davis floated, hiding his desire to anchor SportsCenter and find a way to college sports.

***

Davis would audit internal college football meetings at the network, to make his intentions clear. The product became College Football Final, or just Final, a Saturday evening cult allergic to DVR settings and heavy on costumes.

"College Football Final will always be special. It was the punctuation, the exclamation point on the day," Davis says.

Davis, Lou Holtz and Mark May would show up around midnight to suss highlights and headlines, sometimes with skits and gimmicks that met the looniness of the hour.

The man who doesn't drink or swear provided the best television of his career while tucking drunk fans into bed. Frat houses, bars and couches across America have for years ended their Saturdays with Davis. Among coworkers, Davis is the American Dad exemplar, an island in the era of Bristol gossip.

"Not to be sacrilegious, but I've told people before that we should make those WWJD, What Would Jesus Do? bracelets but stamp them WWRDD, What Would Rece Davis Do?" Van Pelt says. "If you're turning over rocks looking for slugs on that guy, good luck."

There are no Rece outbursts on YouTube. No one's bringing up cell phone pictures. Davis is the guy notorious for calling night games and taking 6 a.m. flights back for baseball games and school plays. When pressed, the only big media aspiration he can come up with is voicing Thomas & Friends.

He even softened Keith Olbermann, momentarily. Davis spent years as the halftime studio host for Thanksgiving broadcasts. Leigh would cook a massive spread and invite ESPN -- all of it.

"Every year, I just worried about who was going to feed Mark May. I really did," Leigh says.

One year a plate went to Bristol for Olbermann, who never visited the house. Olbermann sent an inter-office memo: "WHAT IS BROWN STUFF?"

Davis, back to the studio: "BROWN STUFF IS SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE."

Olbermann: "BROWN STUFF IS VERY GOOD."

***

Fowler knew in 2013 his time as host was perhaps nearing its end, and his 2014 contract expanded his tennis coverage. His and Herbstreit's juggling of GameDay and the marquee ABC night game was, at times, less than ideal. In Week 2, GameDay was live from Oregon in the morning. With Virginia Tech-Ohio State too far away, Fowler and Herbstreit were assigned USC-Stanford.

With less than a three-hour window, the pair left Oregon's campus in traffic and boarded a charter that took a touch-and-go landing at the San Jose airport, forcing a delay while the plane had to circle Silicon Valley. With traffic into Palo Alto -- "They don't really do police escorts quite like Tuscaloosa," Fowler says -- the pair made it minutes before kickoff.

"And there’s no backup plan," Fowler says. "John Saunders, Mack Brown, and Danny Kanell would’ve been calling it from a monitor in Bristol. That was definitely a sign that we should probably not plan it that way."

When the show ended last season at Baylor, Fowler said nothing to his coworkers or the audience, determined to take it all in.

"I was fully aware this could be it, in terms of going to a campus. But you don’t say anything because you don’t know if it could be true, and there was a lot to talk about that day. You just don’t want to put emphasis on that. The mission of the show is paramount."

Davis and his agent began negotiating a new deal. Competing networks lined up, CBS chief among them, according to sources.

"I can't sit here and say GameDay was always the goal," Davis says. "I was asked a lot of times over the years if my goal was to get to the NFL. I always said that I was so passionate about college football that I already felt like I had a great job. Now, I felt like, as my contract came up this time, that role needed to evolve and grow. It was time for a new challenge, but it wasn't necessarily that that challenge was GameDay. The way I phrased it to my management was that I wanted as high a profile spot as possible in the college football landscape."

"I sort of knew about 50-50, 55-45, what was going to happen," Fowler said. "It really depended on Rece re-signing. If he doesn’t stay at ESPN or he doesn’t want to do GameDay, then I’m still sitting there."

"There was no list. Rece was the guy. We weren’t entertaining any other option, so it made it very simple," ESPN Senior VP Mark Gross said. "There was no apprehension with Rece. From the day he walked in the door, you knew he worked with passion, and people with passion overdeliver."

With Davis as the new GameDay host, Fowler will continue as ABC's Saturday night play-by-play man.

Management wouldn't fully trust anyone besides Fowler or Davis. On-air talent felt no one else was capable of shouldering the transition from Fowler and building the same quality with a new signature.

"[ESPN and I] had talked several years prior, just about where I was. I had some stuff going on and my deal was up and you know, you take inventory," Van Pelt says. "I was lucky enough to sort of look over the wall and see what was available to me [outside of ESPN]. And Chris said to me, apropos of nothing, ‘Well hey, I’m not going to do GameDay forever.’ And I just laughed and said, 'No fucking way.' It's that old adage about coaching: Don't follow the legend, follow the guy who followed the legend.

"If anyone can do it ... well, actually, [Davis] is the only one who can do it. Because he’s as ingrained in college football as Chris, but he’s also a completely different personality. He’s Southern, he’s charming, he's got a presence. So combine being charming, personable and that level of passion and knowledge for the sport, and what’s that list? One guy, right?"

***

It is August 26, the first day of the new GameDay. One of the program's less ballyhooed customs is a studio season preview, taped to air the Saturday before Week 1. The debate is what to debate; USC head coach Steve Sarkisian showed up to a booster function drunk, and a Baylor player's conviction for sexual assault has raised the question of what Art Briles knew about that player's past.

Howard, sitting in the back of the room, is ready to go on Sarkisian, the easier talking point. He leans forward, animated.

"Up-downs? Up-downs? Seriously? Give me a break. What's a player's punishment in that situation?" Howard says.

He'll anchor the talk with his ex-player's perspective that Sark's punishment -- those up-downs -- is disproportionate to what an authority figure should suffer. Herbstreit and Corso color their thoughts with the larger ramifications for USC.

They decide to bail on Baylor. Too many variables on the timeline to construct an informed opinion. Davis will mention both but steer debate to Sark. Baylor will wait until Week 1 in Fort Worth at the live GameDay, giving the story a week-plus to solidify.

"Rece is absolutely trusted among guys like me, former coaches or players. He listens. He knows what you're wanting to convey and he'll still challenge you at times when it's needed."

-- Jay Bilas

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Davis is often the forgotten framer of someone else's talked-about segment. At the 2015 NBA Draft, Davis transitioned from a Shannon Spake interview with 13-year-old Moziah Bridges by asking analyst Jay Bilas if Bridges would be ineligible for college play one day because of his successful bowtie business. Bilas, the network's most vocal critic of the NCAA, pounced.

"Rece is absolutely trusted among guys like me, former coaches or players," Bilas says. "He listens. He knows what you're wanting to convey and he'll still challenge you at times when it's needed.

"He calls it 'the responsible opposing view.' When he's not making you look good, he's making you comfortable. It's such a luxury; I know we're talking football, but he's the ultimate point guard. He has you concentrated on your job because he's got everything else to a point that you're not aware of anything but your own job."

***

"Chris to me is college football," Herbstreit said. "When I think of college football, I think of Chris. You can close your eyes and hear his voice and the chili's on the stove, the leaves are changing, it's football. So it's not so simple for me, having basically lived with Chris professionally, to say, 'Hey, OK! Rece!' What Chris brought to the show will be missed on so many different levels. But the guy they bring in, he's got all this experience, but he loves college football. He loves it.

"Twenty years in, I know so much more about television, that with Rece's experience, I'd be very surprised if we didn't build a rapport quickly. We've both been around so long. And it really does matter that he's also one of the nicest human beings I've ever met."

There is no interesting debate in Bristol about Fowler and Davis, even off the record. Unless you're fantasy drafting television broadcasters, in which ESPN is clearly cheating.

"If you’re ESPN, you can’t let Rece Davis walk out the door. You can’t," Van Pelt says. "Absolutely I’m sure CBS would’ve loved to have had him in some role, whatever it might have been."

Those who know Davis expect the point guard to play through distraction in Week 2, when Leigh will handle moving Christopher in at Princeton, where he'll play baseball for the Tigers. Davis has informed opinions about the college recruiting process, having now lived it as a parent; they will find GameDay eventually.

"He's the guy I harass about the game, and I mean harass," Van Pelt says. "Every time I see him it's a thousand questions and comments, 'Can you believe this or that, or why this?' He should cringe and avoid me in the halls, but he never does."

When you exit Bristol, the atrium outside the HD studio facility features a stories-high installation of SportsCenter catch phrases. It's one of those coy branding maneuvers, like Fitting's denial of GameDay's place as the show of record: "We're not the news, we're just entertainment!"

After 20 years, Davis has no catch phrase, and at this phase, likely never will. He is formless in the realm of hot takes. He has landed the most important job in the sport that shaped his life, exactly what he set out for.

"Isn’t the moral of that story the best possible one? That being good is still the best way to succeed? That you don’t have to be the loudest or most controversial and take some preposterous stance for the sake of it? That if you show up and do the work, do it exceptionally well and with more smile than snark?" Van Pelt says.

"The takeaway ought to be encouraging. That being great at your job is good enough."