At Packers Training Camp, All Hail the Ball King

On Monday at Green Bay Packers training camp, Tucker Kraft caught a ball in the flat and headed up the right sideline. Safety Evan Williams converged quickly to force a fumble.

Williams was happy. Defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley was happy. Maybe nobody was happier than The Ball King.

Wendel Davis was part of coach Matt LaFleur’s original coaching staff in 2019. Officially, he’s in his seventh season as defensive quality control coach. Unofficially, he’s in his first season as Ball King.

“We call him ‘Ball King’ around here, so if you see Wendel around, make sure it’s no longer Wendel. It’s Ball King,” LaFleur said before Tuesday’s practice.

On Wednesday, Hafley took reporters inside the king’s castle doors.

“I had the idea before training camp,” Hafley said. “I wanted to find a way to emphasize it, and there’s different ways that I’ve done it in the past. I grabbed Wendel and I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got some ideas, but I want you to run with this.’”

Ball King was born.

“They’re not allowed to call him Wendel Davis anymore,” Hafley said. “He’s The Ball King. So, if you see him, please refer to him as ‘B.K.’ or ‘Ball King.’”

Every day, Davis talks turnovers at the defensive meeting. He takes a fun approach to a serious message. Last season, the Packers finished fourth in the NFL with 31 takeaways. Broken down, they were tied for third with 17 interceptions and ranked third outright with 14 recovered fumbles. They finished eighth with 16 forced fumbles. That’s where Hafley sees room for growth entering his second season at coordinator.

“We took the ball away last year,” Hafley said. “We didn’t force enough fumbles and that’s not good enough, so the emphasis coming in is, one, our play style: How hard we’re going to play, how physical we’re going to play, how we run to the ball. That’s non-negotiable. The other is we’re going to attack the football, so we need to emphasize it more. We need to coach it better. That’s been the No. 1 emphasis of training camp.”

That’s where Davis, err, Ball King comes in.

“You can see the buy-in of the players,” Hafley said. “As coaches, let’s be real, we can talk about anything and you could emphasize stuff, but they have to buy in, and they have. Whoever’s out at practice, you’re seeing some haymakers being thrown at the ball right now, and it can’t just be from one guy. It has to be from everybody, and I appreciate the buy-in of the players, but we want to lead the league in forced fumbles. We are going to have to work at it and that’s very important to us.”

Before Hafley gets into showing clips of what went right and what went wrong at practice and installing a segment of the playbook, Davis gets to make his presentation.

“Because the ball is the most important thing,” Hafley said.

Hafley said teams were picked, clips are shown and the score is kept. An award is handed out every week.

“We hold them accountable and have a game within the game,” Hafley explained. “So, he gets up there and he’ll show the point system. He’s got a unique siren built into the ceiling that every time we get a turnover, he hits a button and the siren blares. So, we want to sound the siren as much as we can.

“He has fun with it. He’ll show some video clips, some fun videos, but it always come back to different ways to teach how to attack the football. How are we going to respond when we get an interception? The ball’s on the ground, how are we going to scoop it? He’ll call guys out who were in position to take a punch and they didn’t. He’ll call guys out who we don’t think took a real punch, took a not very aggressive punch. But it’s stuff the guys are having fun with. They’re starting to swing, and they’re starting to run out of the stacks, and that’s what I’m most proud of right now is the effort that the guys have.”

Davis, a two-year starting linebacker at Arkansas who intercepted two passes in his college career, started his climb up the coaching ladder as a volunteer assistant at West Texas A&M from 2010 through 2012. He joined the Packers in 2019 after three seasons as a graduate assistant at Georgia.

“He gets up there and does an unbelievable job and the guys have fun with it,” Hafley said. “There’s a lot of time in training camp where I think we’re on the guys hard constantly and we’re in the meeting rooms and we’re watching film and we’re demanding and we’re locked in, but then there needs to be an, ‘All right, catch your breath, let’s all have fun together,’ and he brings that out a lot.

So, I’m pretty proud of Wendel – or Ball King – and I think it truly helped him, too. He’s become a really good football coach, and that’s what you want as a coordinator, you want your position coaches to go on and become coordinators, you want your QCs to come on and become position coaches, and I think he’s putting himself on that path and that’s also part of our job.”