Dressed in black, a hooded figure jogged out of the dark tunnel, smoke swirling around him.
Jordan Davis couldn’t believe it. But even before the PA announcer’s voice resounded across Orlando’s Camping World Stadium, Davis knew.
“Please welcome home Gunnery Sgt. Chauncey Davis!” the voice boomed over the mic.
For the first time in more than three years, Jordan Davis laid eyes on his father.
He walked, then jogged toward the man he hadn’t seen since the start of ninth grade. The two embraced.
A senior at Southwind High School in Memphis, playing in the 2018 Under Armour All-American Game, Davis never expected his dad to surprise him with a return from Marine Corps deployment in Japan.
“It was very shocking for me,” Davis said. “It was unexplainable.”
It was also bittersweet. Davis hadn’t always had his father around for some of the biggest moments in his life, leaving a void he knew someone had to fill. His mother, Tiffany Harmon, gave her son all the support she could, but everyone knew something was missing.
“You’ve got to have that type of figure in your life, that male figure in your life,” Davis said. “A woman can’t show you everything.”
But there was someone who stepped into that role in Davis’ life. Who helped him become a national recruit. Who helped Davis survive at his lowest point. Who got Davis to Mississippi State and helped him thrive.
His name is John Danley, and in eight years of knowing Davis, he’s done all of that and more.
“He is the man behind Jordan,” Harmon said. “He did it. There was nobody else.”
Meeting a mentor
If not for a scary moment in eighth grade, Davis might never have met Danley.
Harmon was at home one day when three children banged on the door. She didn’t know it at the time, but a neighbor informed her they were carrying weapons. One held a machete. Another had a hammer. The third wielded a knife.
They were looking for her son.
The bad blood had begun to flow when Davis celebrated scoring a touchdown against a smaller boy during a sandlot football game. Towering over everyone at 5-foot-10, Davis didn’t look like the eighth-grader he was.
The boy Davis scored on thought Davis was an older teenager, maybe even an adult — and he wasn’t happy.
“It just went left,” Harmon recalled. “It was just chaos from there.”
The boy ran and got his siblings, and they brought weapons. Davis had to bring his younger brother Jaylen home safely, and by some stroke of luck, he chose a route home that bypassed the boys.
Davis was safe from harm, but Harmon was still shaken.
After Davis finished eighth grade, Harmon moved her sons out of their apartment and into a house in a much nicer neighborhood. They felt at peace.
Of course, Davis still needed a trainer — as well as a father figure. Harmon’s uncles, brothers and male friends were often blunt with her: Her son needed a man around.
“You always need your parents, but there’s a period of time where you need your father — especially for a boy,” Harmon said. “There’s a cutoff point for the mamas.”
Chauncey Davis was there on occasion for his son, but his military service was just one of the factors limiting his time with Jordan. To Harmon, it wasn’t enough.
“Do I feel that he wanted to be active and involved? I will say yes,” she said. “But words come with action. If you’re going to be there, be there.
“He wasn’t there at the crucial times in his life that he probably needed to be; however, yes, he did show up,” she added.
Not long after the end of Davis’ freshman football season at Southwind, a mutual friend, Jermaine Johnson, introduced Harmon to Danley. Both Harmon and Danley came from Greenville, and Danley — the head football coach at Byhalia High School for the 2012 and 2013 seasons — seemed like a good fit.
Danley began working with Davis, but the boy was awkward. Already standing more than 6-foot-2, Davis was unable to get into a three-point stance with the correct foot forward.
“Looking at him, he looked more like a basketball player than he did a football player,” Danley said.
That changed a bit when Davis put on more than 15 pounds of muscle in five months. Danley took him to a recruiting camp at the University of Memphis that summer, getting Davis used to how camps were run.
Then it was time for camps to get used to Davis.
The following year, he earned invites to Nike, Under Armour and Adidas events. At a Nike camp in New Orleans, Davis was named one of the four best defensive linemen in attendance.
By the time he crossed the Mississippi state line on the way home, social media was abuzz with his name.
“That’s when it began,” Danley said.
A different route
Davis was praised for his athleticism, range, length and explosion. Recruiting writers started to promote him. Schools — big schools — showed interest.
The budding star visited Alabama with Southwind head coach Rahnmann Slocum. Davis’ next visit to Tuscaloosa was with Danley.
“If Bama offers, why would you turn it down?” Danley asked Davis.
The young player listened. He accepted Nick Saban’s scholarship offer, choosing the Crimson Tide on Dec. 10, 2016, in the middle of his junior year.
“Once he committed to Alabama, it was just like the floodgates (opened),” Danley said.
Power Five schools from across the country came calling. Jordan Davis became a household name.
Davis stuck with the Crimson Tide.
Then it all fell apart.
Davis’ grades weren’t good enough. He was deemed academically ineligible to play at Alabama, and he still rues falling short.
“The only thing I regret and the only thing I tell kids is, ‘stay in them books,’” Davis said. “That’s all I want everybody to do. … You learn from your mistakes.”
As an upperclassman in high school, Davis tried to amend for his poor academic performance earlier on. He often came to work with Harmon at Wellcare Health Plans, sitting in the lobby and getting homework done. She went over Davis’ assignments with him and made sure he truly understood them rather than “breezing through the work.”
Harmon said she sent what her son at the time called “nagging” text messages with reminders to complete work. She had access to his online student portal so she could view his grades and remind him of assignments.
“My mom was there all the way,” Davis said.
It wasn’t enough. Davis couldn’t make up for ninth-grade transgressions as a high school senior. His straightforward life plan — get to Alabama, excel there and go straight to the NFL — had been thrown for a loop.
And he wasn’t happy.
“He thought he was just out,” Harmon said. “‘You’re not out,’” she told him. “‘Your route is just different, that’s all. You’re never out. You just have to go a different route.’”
Harmon knows about that.
Just 19 when Davis was born, she had no choice but to disenroll from Arkansas–Pine Bluff to care for her son. She had to give up her hard-earned privileges: her scholarship; her spot in the band.
She wasn’t about to let her son suffer the same fate.
“He really was down on himself — ‘No. I’m just not going to go. I’m not going to go to school. It’s just over for me.’
“It wasn’t over for me,” Harmon pointed out.
The next step
In the summer of 2017, Copiah-Lincoln Community College accepted Davis as a student.
That was news to him.
Unwilling to see Davis give up on getting an education, Harmon enrolled her son in junior college at the last minute, convincing coaches to accept him to the team. Reluctantly, Davis packed his bags and headed south to Wesson.
He figured he’d never play Division I football again and found that hard to accept. At the beginning, he insisted he wasn’t supposed to be there. Coaches had to walk him to class to get him to go.
But when Davis realized hard work could put him back on the right path, he started to fit in.
“This is not the end-all place to be,” Co-Lin head coach Glenn Davis said. “It’s the next step.”
Once a player as “hard to handle” on the field as Jordan Davis understood that, it proved easy to get back into the D-I ranks.
Danley said big-time offers out of high school gave Davis a “big head,” but his time at Co-Lin — where the school and facilities just couldn’t measure up to Power Five programs — cooled Davis off.
“The fact that he ended up going to Co-Lin, it humbled him,” Danley said. “It brought him back down. It increased his work ethic. It made him hungry again. It was a low point, but at the same time, it was very beneficial.”
After re-committing to Alabama and then switching his choice to Tennessee, Davis ended up somewhere his mother never expected: Mississippi State.
To his family, Davis talked up the “Southernness” of Starkville as well as the morale inside the Bulldogs’ program.
“He was just really impressed,” Harmon said. “I was really blown away. … When he started talking about it, I was like, ‘Are you sure?’”
Davis was. He graduated from Co-Lin and signed with MSU in December 2019.
He remains grateful for his time in the junior-college ranks. In 2020, Davis filmed a recruiting video and sent it to the Wolves’ head coach.
He praised the efforts of Co-Lin’s coaching staff, including Glenn Davis’ son Micah, for staying on him academically — making sure Davis had turned in all his assignments; keeping him from procrastinating.
“He’s grown up as a man,” Glenn Davis said. “If anybody deserves to have something good happen to them, it’s him.”
‘A proud parent’
Good things are indeed happening for Davis as kickoff approaches for his third season at Mississippi State — a campaign that begins against Memphis, his hometown team.
Davis is fully healthy after an ACL tear that cost him all of the 2021 season. He’s playing on a stacked, experienced defensive line. He was a preseason third-team all-Southeastern Conference selection.
He sees his father more. Chauncey now lives in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and he and his son talk more than they used to. Occasionally, he comes to games — and not out of the tunnel.
“I see him all the time,” Davis said.
He still talks to Danley constantly. No topic is off limits: life, relationships, cars. Davis loves cars, but he also loves to drive fast; Danley has to remind him to slow things down.
They talk about football. Danley realized early on he had trained Davis into the type of player he was — an aggressive trash-talker — and he had to pull back a bit.
“I want him to be able to turn it on on the field but at the same time be that same gentle giant off the field. I put so much into him to the point where he started to act like me, and I’m like, ‘S—,” Danley said.
He still pushes Davis hard when it comes to school. Davis is a far cry from where he was five years ago; he graduated from MSU in December with an undergraduate degree in business.
Harmon cried when Davis got his associate’s degree from Co-Lin and again when he got his bachelor’s, proud of her son but no doubt thinking of the dreams she gave up to bear him.
“When he got his first degree, I think I was emotional for weeks because it meant so much,” Harmon said. “Then when he came back and got the bachelor’s, it was the same thing. Anybody’s graduation tears me up.”
For Davis, it isn’t over. He hopes to start a master’s program soon, aiming to complete a “trifecta” Danley said would mean the world to him.
No matter what, though he’s proud of how far Davis has come.
“I’m a proud parent, man,” Danley said.
Danley might not be Davis’ biological parent, but it doesn’t matter. They have the same initials — ‘ain’t that something?’ Danley said — and they’re often mistaken for father and son.
Of course, who’s to say they aren’t?
“When you hear people talk about him, they’re always saying good things,” Danley said. “It makes me proud. I’m proud of him.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 31 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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