Carl Davis spent a decade in the NFL doing work that never showed up on a stat sheet. He has no plans to change now.
Davis, the Detroit native who starred at Iowa before the Baltimore Ravens drafted him in the third round in 2015, played 78 games for eight organizations across a decade in the league. He was never the sack artist. He was the 320-pound problem who occupied two blockers so somebody else could make the tackle. That job description became a worldview, and that worldview is now a business.
Davis spoke with PFSN’s Unguarded Access at Pro Athlete Community’s Accelerate Event in Phoenix, a multi-day conference designed to prepare players for their post-NFL careers.
How Carl Davis Turned Iowa’s Double Teams Into the Trench Work Mindset
The philosophy Davis calls “trench work” was born during a brutal freshman year in Iowa City, where he says he was “forged by the fire” of Kirk Ferentz’s program. It crystallized on the field, where his value rarely registered with fans.
“I took on a lot of double teams, but my linebackers appreciated me because they can make the clean tackle,” Davis said. “I was never really a statistical guy. I learned how to take pride in that.”
For Davis, the trenches stopped being a football term a long time ago. He tells a story about a woman he watched cleaning the floors at the airport on his way to Phoenix, mopping and brushing the same spot until it was right.
“I wanted to make her feel known, like, you’re doing a good job,” Davis said. “That’s her trench every day.”
That mindset got stress-tested quickly. Washington released Davis last August, and instead of waiting by the phone, he launched a general freight trucking company under his Trenchwork brand. He didn’t just buy the trucks.
“Soon as I got cut from Washington, I started my trucking business,” Davis said. “I got in the truck myself.” He drove a haul to New York and back before a pinched nerve in his back forced him out of the driver’s seat.
Trenchwork Enterprises now spans that trucking operation, a co-owned med spa in Atlanta, a planned senior care home in Detroit, and a partnership with Invest With Roots, an Atlanta real estate fund that invests renters’ security deposits alongside its investors. “You can invest with as little as $100,” Davis said.
Housing Homeless Veterans in Detroit Is Carl Davis’ Next Trench
The venture closest to his heart started with a phone call from his aunt, Pazzella Colston Bonner, a veteran herself.
“She called me one day and she was like, ‘Hey, nephew, I want to buy this house. I want to house veterans,’” Davis said. “And I was like, ‘I’m with it. Let’s do it.’”
That became Homes for Heroic Veterans, which provides transitional housing for homeless veterans in Metro Detroit. “Now we have an apartment building and we have two single-family homes, and we’re still looking to expand,” Davis said. “You’re not just changing one person, you’re really changing whole families.”
Davis sees a parallel between the veterans his aunt serves and the players he came up with. Both spend their lives inside rigid structures, then get released into a world with none.
“I’ve been told what to do my whole life, and now all of a sudden nobody’s telling me what to do,” Davis said. “It sounds crazy, because everybody said I don’t want to be told what to do, but we really do.”
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His answer is to show athletes the unglamorous middle steps nobody films. “We also get told, hey, you should invest in this company,” Davis said. “But nobody is really showing people how to do it from ground zero. That’s what I plan on doing, using my platform and showing people ground zero stuff.”
The biggest swing is still ahead: buying and revitalizing his boarded-up elementary school in Detroit as the anchor of a neighborhood transformation. “If we can do this in Detroit,” Davis said, “then I think we can do this anywhere.”