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By NATE ATKINS -- natkins@mlive.com

When Lions general manager Bob Quinn fired Jim Caldwell after a 9-7 season last month, he fired his offensive line coach, too. If second-place finishes weren't good enough, nor was the production he saw out of a unit he pumped first-round picks, trades and top-tier free-agent contracts into.

He said he'd find someone better, someone more qualified to make use of the resources at play around Matthew Stafford. He wound up with Jeff Davidson, a former Ohio State guard with Patriots connections and a long history in the area he's about to try to fix in Detroit.

The run and the pass are imperatives to the Lions success now that Stafford owns the richest contract in NFL history, is in his ninth year and has still never had a running game. Detroit has produced seven 100-yard rushers in his nine years as quarterback. By contrast, Dak Prescott played with seven in just his rookie year with the Cowboys.

The Lions said they were emphasizing the run last offseason, but then they finished dead last in the league in yards per carry. Jim Bob Cooter is staying on as offensive coordinator, for now at least, because run designs are the line coach's worry. Davidson is his first hire in that regard.

Davidson's 23-year pro coaching career features a mix of rebuilding efforts and attempts to become the best unit in the league. The 50-year-old has manned different roles along the way, including spending eight seasons as the lead offensive line coach.

His connections and resume brought him here, and those are about to go under the microscope with the challenge he has now.

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The resume

Here's where Davidson has been over the past three decades:

Ohio State guard, 1986-89

Denver Broncos guard, 1990-93

New Orleans Saints guard, 1994

New Orleans Saints offensive assistant, 1995-1996

New England Patriots tight ends coach, 1997

New England Patriots offensive line coach, 1998-2004

Cleveland Browns offensive line coach, 2005

Cleveland Browns offensive coordinator/assistant head coach, 2006

Carolina Panthers offensive coordinator, 2007-10

Minnesota Vikings offensive line coach, 2011-2015

San Diego Chargers offensive line coach, 2016

Denver Broncos offensive line coach, 2017

Detroit Lions offensive line coach, 2018

That's 32 consecutive years spent playing and coaching the positions that create a ground game. The stops along the way added different layers to his scheme, starting most notably with a dynasty nobody saw coming at the time:

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1998-2004: Patriots assistant O-Line coach

Davidson first started coaching offensive lines in the NFL in 1998, when he moved from the Patriots' tight ends room over to assist. He worked under Paul Boudreau for the first year and then spent the next five under Dante Scarnecchia, the man who is still coaching this group for the Patriots and is considered one of the greatest line coaches in NFL history.

Here's how the Patriots run games ranked in yards per carry during those years:

1998: 23rd

1999: 26th

2000: 28th

2001: 23rd

2002: 26th

2003: 30th

Average: 26th

It wasn't a great stretch of rushing, as those Patriots teams were built more around the pass, heading in a different direction than much of the league. But they won three Super Bowls in this span, and Davidson's contributions earned him his first of many jobs directly designing the running game.

Here's where those ground attacks have ranked in yards per carry:

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2005 (Browns O-Line): 20th

Davidson joined the Browns when his former fellow Patriots assistant Romeo Crennel put him in charge of the offensive line. Cleveland featured a rebuilding offensive line and a free-agent pickup at running back in Reuben Droughns, and Droughns became the run game that year with 1,232 yards. That helped earn Davidson a promotion to offensive coordinator the next season.

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2006 (Browns O-Coordinator): 29th

Springing the first Browns 1,000-yard rusher since they returned to the league earned Davidson his first chance to call the plays he designed in practice. It didn't go particularly well, as the Browns finished second-worst in total yards and rushing yards. Droughns took a step back to fewer than 800 yards. Losing Pro Bowl guard LeCharles Bentley in his first practice was a killer, and Davidson then chased a better opportunity elsewhere.

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2007 (Panthers O-Coordinator): 15th

Davidson found himself a much better personnel match in Carolina, where the Panthers had just reached the NFC Championship Game with rushing duo of DeShaun Foster and DeAngelo Williams. The offensive line was a constant work in progress, though, and Davidson helped them take a small step from 18th the year before to 15th in his first season.

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2008 (Panthers OC): 2nd

After Foster retired, Davidson drafted himself a power back to combine with Williams' big-play ability. Behind an improving offensive line that featured rising second-year center Ryan Kalil, Williams and Jonathan Stewart combined for 2,300 yards. The Panthers went 12-4, and their 30 rushing touchdowns are still the most any team has scored in the past 11 seasons.

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2009 (Panthers OC): 2nd

Stewart and Williams became the ultimate 1A-1B pairing in their second year together. Stewart had 1,133 yards and Williams had 1,117. The scoring went way down to 18 touchdowns, though, thanks in part to 18 Jake Delhomme interceptions, and the Panthers went 8-8.

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2010 (Panthers OC): 10th

Williams got hurt six games into the year, and Stewart wasn't quite a feature back. The Panthers finished 10th in rushing average but only found the end zone six times on the ground during Jimmy Clausen's trainwreck of a rookie year. Carolina finished last in the league in offense, and a 2-14 record sent the coaching staff out of town.

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2011 (Vikings OL): 2nd

Davidson's firing as an offensive coordinator led him to a pretty ideal second job coaching an offensive line. He got to design plays for Adrian Peterson, the best running back of the generation who at this point was entering his fifth year in the league. Davidson established a mix of power and zone elements in Minnesota, capitalizing on a speedy downhill runner in Peterson. He built it with an offensive line of solid but unspectacular players, including a Steve Hutchinson on the back nine of his career. Peterson missed four games this year, but Minnesota still finished second in rushing.

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2012 (Vikings OL): 1st

Davidson's first year with a healthy Peterson was a race toward history. Back just months after an ACL tear, Peterson ripped off 2,097 yards, the second-best total for a single season in NFL history. Behind Pro Bowl first-round left tackle Matt Kalil, Peterson averaged six yards a carry, which made it easy for the Vikings to lead the league in that category.

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2013 (Vikings OL): 2nd

Kalil's play started to regress back to average in his second season, which was the concerning part for Davidson. His running game still finished second in the league despite two more games that Peterson had to miss.

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2014 (Vikings OL): 10th

The year was the anomaly in Minnesota as it featured Peterson's suspension for child abuse. He only played the opener, and Matt Asiata and Jerick McKinnon split the job over the final 15 games. Asiata scored nine touchdowns that year, which is half of his career total in six years.

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2015 (Vikings OL): 3rd

Peterson came back and ran for a league-best 1,485 yards and 11 touchdowns as the Vikings won the NFC North. It was the pass protection that struggled, ranking fifth in sacks, and that forced coach Mike Zimmer to move on from the offensive line coach he inherited.

Designing a running game around Peterson was a sweet gig, and Davidson did his part well, successfully working one of the last true run-first systems in a division with Aaron Rodgers as the NFL transitioned to a passing league. Davidson's varied schemes and offensive line play had their effects, though Peterson's power and speed turned a system light on star blockers into the most consistent running game in the NFL. It a stretch that probably isn't repeatable, though it does show what the ceiling can look like.

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2016 (Chargers OL): 26th

Davidson's one-year stint with the Chargers was a true rebuilding effort, as San Diego had its own feature back in Melvin Gordon but had wasted his rookie year when it finished dead last in yards per carry behind a disaster of an offensive line. So the Chargers signed a starting guard, drafted a fullback, shuffled the starters up front and put it all in Davidson's hands. It was a major transition from Phillip Rivers' normal shotgun-heavy, single-back approach, but it took some baby steps in improving six spots in the rankings and getting Gordon to 997 yards and 10 touchdowns before he missed the final month with a knee injury. That little extra balance helped a pass-first offense move from 26th in points scored in 2015 to ninth in 2016.

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2017 (Broncos OL): 14th

Davidson's single year in Denver, where he followed fired Chargers coach Mike McCoy when he took over as offensive coordinator, again featured an above-average running game and struggling pass protection. He was handed a talented but raw first-round tackle in Garret Bolles but had so many injuries on the line that Cyrus Kouandjio was starting for him late in the year. He was able to get CJ Anderson to more than 1,000 yards for the first time in his five-year career, but his team finished in the bottom five in sacks, and much of the offensive staff was sent out of town.

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Average: 10th

In 13 years as either a lead offensive line coach or offensive coordinator, Davidson's offenses averaged the 10th most yards per carry in the league. His average is also 10th in his eight years as an offensive line coach.

In those 13 years, Davidson's offenses have had 67 players run for 100 yards in a game. Of those, 39 came when he was an offensive line coach. Three times, he's had multiple 100-yard rushers in a game. Plenty of them came from stars like Peterson, Williams, Stewart and Gordon, but he's also gotten some from random names like Asiata, Toby Gerhart and Cordarrelle Patterson.

In those same 13 years, the Lions have had 13 rushers top 100 yards. None have happened in the past four years.

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The Lions are his run game now, but he's not alone

In Detroit, it'll be Davidson's job to create new run designs that develop a better identity that his linemen and backs can grow in, that on paper give it all a better chance than the failed attempts of years past. He will likely work within Jim Bob Cooter's pistol- and shotgun-heavy approaches, though he could get a chance to retool some of the running approaches potentially with a fullback, like he did for Gordon in San Diego.

He'll need to get the most out of the investments already here for the most part. That includes a fellow former Ohio State lineman in first-round left tackle Taylor Decker, third-round center Graham Glasgow and top-dollar players on the right side in guard TJ Lang and tackle Rick Wagner. It was a banged-up and underperforming group in 2017, ranking last in yards and yards per carry while also giving up the seventh-most sacks.

Bob Quinn has said he'll add a running back this offseason. Jerick McKinnon, who ran for Davidson in Minnesota, is a free agent and could be a possibility. So could adding a left guard to complete the starting line.

Whatever happens, it will likely be a more collaborative effort than it has been in the past.

Matt Patricia was the assistant offensive line coach who replaced Davidson in the Patriots staff. And the new Lions quarterbacks coach, George Godsey, was a New England guy who was an offensive coordinator in Houston from 2015-2016, when his offenses ranked 28th and 18th in yards per carry, respectively.

By contrast, Prince had never been a lead NFL offensive line coach until he took Detroit's job midway through 2015. Since Caldwell and Cooter were pass-oriented, it was a sink-or-swim operation for Prince, and he sank along with his boss.

The Lions don't have to become a dominant running team and likely won't with the way their systems and salaries are structured. They do need to become respectable, as Caldwell said it, a place his ground attacks never got to. Ten of this year's 12 playoff teams finished in the top half of the league in yards per carry.

Detroit's leadership in the area will be more varied and experienced this time around. It has nowhere to go but up, and for the sake of Stafford, Quinn, the droughts of division titles and playoff wins, and all the Lions have pumped into men who play around the quarterback, it has to.

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