Bucs Hire Jacqueline Davidson as Director of Football Research

Former Jets executive will merge Tampa Bay's analytics with football decision-making.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are continuing to grow the analytics side of their football operations, as well as remaining at the forefront when it comes to hiring women in the NFL.

Jacqueline Davidson joins the Bucs as their new director of football research, a position it appears the team may have created simply so they could acquire Davidson and her expertise.

The move was first reported by ESPN's Jenna Laine:

The Bucs continue to be at the forefront of the NFL’s push for more women and minorities. After hiring two female assistants last offseason, they’ve hired Jacqueline Davidson as director of football research. GM @Jasonrlicht told me, “She’s brilliant.” https://t.co/W8G1ieVFEW

— JennaLaineESPN (@JennaLaineESPN) July 28, 2020

Bucs general manager Jason Licht said hiring Davidson was more about bringing in an elite talent than having a particular job or position open, per Laine: 

She's brilliant. She's brilliant with a lot of things, but she's really brilliant with numbers and analytics. It was very important to get her in here. You can't have enough smart people. ... She's gonna help us integrate analytics into our overall football decisions.

Davidson told Laine she acknowledges her opportunity to provide important representation as a Black woman in a high-ranking position in the league:

It's incredibly humbling, and at the same time, I do recognize the importance of it. It was important to me when I was younger, thinking about things that I wanted to do, to see people that look like me, not only in jobs that I knew existed, but in jobs that I didn't have any idea about.

One of the things that, particularly for women and people of color, there are a lot of jobs that I think people close themselves off from because I think they just don't know about them. So it's important to bring a certain awareness to it, and it's something I take very seriously.

Davidson spent 12 years with the New York Jets in a variety of different roles, most recently as the team's director of football administration. For the Bucs, she'll help the team merge their analytics efforts with their football decision-making.

The Bucs have made hiring women a priority, especially since Bruce Arians took over as head coach last offseason, hiring two women as full-time coaches in Lori Locust and Maral Javadifar.