A little more than halfway through the 2024 season, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga running back Reggie Davis finds himself leading the Southern Conference in rushing yards and ranking second in rushing yards per game.
Pretty solid for the first-year starter tasked with replacing the graduated Ailym Ford — a former All-American with more rushing yards than any running back in UTC history — and Gino Appleberry, who provided strong depth and proved quite capable in a bigger role when Ford dealt with injuries.
For the Mocs and Davis, though, the best part about his production is the 6-foot, 200-pound redshirt junior from Montgomery, Alabama, can still be so much better — and that’s what his coaches are honing in on.
“He wants to be good,” sixth-year head coach Rusty Wright said. “Sometimes you want a guy to do it and they’re not sure or they don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter. … He’s plenty capable of doing a lot of good things here, he’s been through a lot and come out on the other side of it, and I think he sees better things ahead for him and works that way and lives life that way now.
“But he wants it, he wants to be that guy, he wants that on his shoulders and does good whether he understands it or not.”
UTC (4-3, 3-1 SoCon), ranked 19th in the Stats Perform FCS Top 25, will try to push its current streak of wins to five when it faces Virginia Military Institute (0-7, 0-4) at 4 p.m. Saturday at Finley Stadium for homecoming. The Keydets are coming off their closest game of the season, a 13-10 loss to The Citadel, and while they trail 19-9-1 in the all-time series against UTC, the Mocs won just 24-23 in last season’s matchup to avoid what would have been their third loss in the past four meetings with VMI (and third in a row in Lexington, Virginia).
Over the past few weeks, the Mocs have shown progress on offense, defense and special teams, and Davis certainly hasn’t hindered that, generating 529 rushing yards through seven games for 75.6 per contest. Among SoCon players, that average trails only East Tennessee State University’s Bryson Irby (85.8). Solid stats, but Davis was also quick to point out during a recent media session that because he leads the conference in carries (136), he “should lead in yards.”
Davis had at least 20 carries in each of the past four games, totaling three touchdowns and 386 yards in those contests. Part of the reason for the added workload has been a lack of depth behind Davis: junior Justus Durant has missed three games due to injury, freshman Journey Wyche was banged up three weeks ago at ETSU and missed the next game at Furman, and senior Lance Jackson was injured in the first half of last Saturday’s game against Wofford.
All that activity has led running backs coach D.J. Knox to pull back some on the practice workload for Davis.
“He’s never shied away from taking any reps or anything like that,” Knox said. “I have to pull him out because I’ve been seeing him do this for seven, eight weeks, and there are some things I don’t need to see him do. But he just has that passion and that fight to just want to always play and go hard, and sometimes I kind of have to pull him back, but it’s starting to show in the games.”
That was a change Davis had to get used to. Now in his fourth year in the program, he was always one of those backup running backs getting all the reps in practice as the coaching staff attempted to preserve the health of Ford and eventually Appleberry. Davis appeared in just one game in 2021 and redshirted in 2022 before rushing for 322 yards on 65 carries with four touchdowns last year.
Now he’s the one watching more in practice while offering instruction and encouragement to the younger guys. It’s a role — leader — that he envisioned early in the year, and now he’s getting an opportunity to be that both on and off the field.
Davis, though, is very aware that there’s another level in him.
“Everybody’s hyping me up about how I’ve been playing lately, but they haven’t seen the Reggie Davis that I know,” he said. “With the way I’ve been developing every week, it’s just showing that I can get back to that guy. I’ve been learning to slow my steps down, and then as the game goes on I actually started to see it, so now I’m in my head every day and I’m getting better because of it.”
And as Wright explained, the job of getting the most out of Davis is a team effort.
“It’s his first time being that guy, and he’s gotten better from week one to now,” the coach said. “We’ve kind of got better figuring out how to get him started, and he will learn those things. He needs to run to space, not into space. … I think he’ll just continue to get better. He wants it, he’s got the drive to go be good and do those things, I know it’s important for him to be good, and again, man, in this day and age, that’s half the battle with him.”
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.