Butch Davis leaving ESPN to return to college football as FIU head coach

Florida International is hiring former Miami and North Carolina head coach Butch Davis to the same job, ESPN said Monday. Davis has been a studio analyst for the network since 2014, but coaching’s always been his thing.

Davis, 64, has been publicly linked to the FIU job for a while now, including during its previous coaching search in 2012. He’ll take over a program that’s shown flashes over the years but has mostly struggled.

The Golden Panthers have only posted two winning seasons since starting up as a program after the turn of the millennium. This is their fourth losing year in a row since joining Conference USA, after a few glimpses of success under Mario Cristobal, whom the brand-new program curiously fired after two bowl trips in three years.

Florida International fired Ron Turner at the end of September, after he went 0-4 to start the year, bringing his four-year mark at the school to 10-30. Turner’s firing was the first of what’s been a quiet season for coach canning.

For Davis, FIU means a homecoming, sort of. The Panthers share the city of Miami with the University of Miami, where Davis went 51-20 from 1995-2000, building an all-star roster that would win the 2001 national title. Davis’ last season leading the Hurricanes ended with an 11-1 record and a Sugar Bowl win, and then he left for a stint as the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. (It was not a brilliant stint, but it was better than most Browns head coaching tenures in this era.)

Davis returned to the college game as UNC’s head coach in 2007, and he went 28-23 over four seasons. He was fired in an NCAA investigation into academic fraud, and the NCAA wiped out two of Davis’ three eight-win seasons in Chapel Hill. He consulted for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2012 and 2013.

Previously, Davis was a Jimmy Johnson assistant, working on his staffs at Oklahoma State, Miami, and the Dallas Cowboys. He left the Cowboys after 1994 to take the head job at Miami.