ECU Poaches JMU Co-Offensive Coordinator Brad Davis

JMU had a prolific offense last season under the direction of Co-Offensive Coordinators Drew Mehringer and Brad Davis. As you’d expect, their success brought a great deal of attention. A few months ago the University of Houston hired Mehringer and now East Carolina University has hired Davis. According to Sports Illustrated’s Thayer Evans, Davis agreed to become ECU’s offensive line coach and run game coordinator. While sharing coordinator duties with Mehringer at JMU, Davis was responsible for coaching the offensive line. Under Davis the Dukes averaged 4.8 yards a carry and averaged over 200 rushing yards a game. It’s easy to understand why ECU wanted him.

There are two ways to look this. The first is to freak out and panic. JMU had a prolific offense last year and now both of the guys who were in charge of it are gone. That’s sort of frightening in some ways and JMU is definitely left with a void to fill.

The second way to look at this is to see it as a sign that Coach Withers has a knack for identifying young, up and coming coaches. There is plenty of turnover in the world of college football coaching. While consistency can be nice, it’s actually better to have other schools coming after your assistants than to have them completely ignored. If nobody every wanted to snag any of JMU’s assistants, that would be a far bigger problem.

However, that doesn’t mean we’re happy to see Davis or Mehringer go. Sure, we’re happy for them and wish them well. This isn’t a Houston or ECU blog though. It’s a JMU blog, so we’re more concerned with who replaces them. Withers replaced Mehringer with Brett Elliot. In much the same way Mehringer earned his stripes as a graduate assistant on a BCS coaching staff, Elliot was a graduate assistant of an SEC staff at Mississippi State. Davis brought more experience to the table having served as the offensive line coach at Portland State prior to joining the JMU program. If the pattern holds, we can probably expect Withers to bring in someone with a few more years under his belt than Elliot. Whoever gets the job will have big shoes to fill. But he’ll also have Vad Lee and some serious talent to work with.