EXCLUSIVE: Pete Jenkins explains Bo Davis’s LSU departure, relationship with Brian Kelly

By Hunt Palmer

Pete Jenkins doesn’t take many 10:30pm phone calls.

So, when Bo Davis, his longtime protégé and friend called late, he knew something was up.

“He said, ‘Coach Pete, I really need to talk to you,’” Jenkins recalled Thursday on After Further Review with Matt Moscona. The full interview can be seen at the bottom of this post “He said, ‘look, I’ll call you first thing in the morning.’ And we got off the phone. Well, I can’t go back to sleep now. I thought, damn he’s ruined my night.”

Jenkins called Davis back, and the two discussed Davis’s pending opportunity to leave LSU, where Jenkins coached Davis more than 30 years ago, to join the New Orleans Saints.

Davis has reportedly agreed to join New Orleans, but the decision weighed heavily on him according to Jenkins who said the final decision was made late last week.

“It was not as soon as it was mentioned to him, he jumped in the boat,” Jenkins said. “He gave it a lot of thought. And he expressed to me how much he liked Coach (Brian) Kelly. And Bo don’t like just anybody to be honest with you.”

With the move to the NFL, Davis becomes the latest coach to flee the college ranks for the pros. Transfer portal and NIL policies have rocked the landscape of college football, and some coaches have had a harder time dealing with it than others.

In Davis’s first offseason on the job, LSU was desperate for defensive linemen in the transfer portal. Davis and the staff hosted TCU’s Damonic Williams and Michigan State’s Simeon Barrow. Both landed elsewhere.

“He worked his butt off to get those two kids,” Jenkins said. “At the end of the day, Bo gets outbid on those guys. And I know that feeling from free agency in pro football…and Bo was really shaken by losing those two guys. So, yeah, I think that played a big part in Bo’s decision. He really wasn’t used to losing those guys at Texas.”

The news of Davis’s departure created a flood of text messages to Jenkins’s phone light-heartedly suggesting he’d come back to work at age 83.

“I said, hey, can’t do it, out of gas,” Jenkins said with a chuckle.