The Express: The Ernie Davis Story is a 2008 sports film based on the life of Ernie Davis, the first African-American football player to win the Heisman Trophy, the most esteemed award in Collegiate American Football. Starring Rob Brown as Davis and Dennis Quaid as coach Ben Schwartzwalder, the movie is also the film debut of Chadwick Boseman in a brief cameo appearance as future NFL star Floyd Little.
This movie provides examples of:
- Artistic License – History: The climax of the film is set at the Cotton Bowl, but the Orangemen had already been selected as the national champion at the end of the regular season. The film likewise fudges the scores, numbers, and locations of several games, actually making some events less dramatic than their real counterparts for the sake of simplicity. Of course, many former players from Syracuse's opponents have also rejected their depictions as outright racists, and while those protests can be taken with a certain grain of salt, the scene at West Virginia could not have occurred because the team played that school at home in 1959.
- Big Game: The 1960 Cotton Bowl Classic against Texas for Syracuse's first national championship (unlike real life, where they had already been selected before the bowl game).
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Davis faces multiple instances of explicit racial discrimination, particularly when playing in the South.
