Nearly two decades after arriving in the NFL as a backup quarterback and sharing a quarterback room with Alex Smith and Shaun Hill in San Francisco, 39-year-old Nate Davis turned back the clock.
Last Sunday at Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Davis threw five touchdown passes—all to Jalen Sample—to lead the San Diego Strike Force to a 54-47 victory over the Tucson Sugar Skulls in the opening round of the Indoor Football League playoffs, sending the franchise to the Western Conference championship game.
The next morning, Davis, who didn’t commit a turnover in the win, needed only three words to sum it up.
“I feel good,” Davis said.
Strike Force head coach Taylor Genuser, his voice still hoarse Monday morning, was far more effusive in his praise.
“It’s hard for us to win if he doesn’t play well because we give him so much,” Genuser said. “He’s our franchise player, so we put the ball in his hands and he played fantastic last night. Him and Sample were on one. They had an unbelievable connection. I was just proud to see us getting out of third- and fourth-down situations and extending drives.
“Nate threw a lot of passes that maybe young quarterbacks wouldn’t even attempt and we had receivers making a lot of catches in traffic. He was just on point, very, very surgical when it came to money downs.”
“He’s the Dan Marino of arena football,” Strike Force kicker Ernesto Lacayo added.
Strike Force quarterback Nate Davis. A teammate calls him the “Dan Marino of arena football.” (Photo courtesy of the San Diego Strike Force)Lacayo, like Davis, is also defying time. At 37, the veteran kicker is one season away from tying Mark Lewis’ Indoor Football League longevity record and hopes to set a new standard in 2028 before retiring.
“Mark Lewis is one of our all-time great arena kickers,” Lacayo said. “Now that I’ve gotten close to it, and I’m here, my goal is to break the record. By getting to Year 17, I think that will probably be the end for me. “I’ve always said I want to be respectful to my wife and everyone who has supported me throughout my career. But everyone keeps telling me, ‘At this point, go break it. Go break the record. Do what you need to do.’”
In the IFL, experience is a limited commodity. League rules allow each team to carry no more than seven players with four or more seasons of professional football experience in any league, making veterans like Davis and Lacayo especially valuable.
Why the win mattered
Sunday marked the first time in franchise history San Diego hosted and won a home playoff game.
The moment was a stark contrast from the franchise’s inaugural season in 2019, when the Strike Force finished 1-13. After the IFL returned from its two-year COVID-19 hiatus, San Diego went 3-13 before making the postseason for the first time in 2024. The Strike Force returned to the playoffs in 2025 and entered this year’s postseason as the Western Conference’s No. 1 seed for the first time.
“It’s amazing thinking about playing in Pechanga Arena in front of about 75 people,” Genuser, who was the team’s offensive coordinator in 2019, said. Seven years later, nearly 4,300 fans packed Frontwave Arena to watch the Strike Force open the playoffs.
View this post on Instagram“It’s just amazing growth from the people that have helped us start it, the people that have been here along the way and the people that are here now,” Genuser said.
Lacayo, who was also with the team during its inaugural season in 2019, said the difference was impossible to miss.
“When the whistle blew for the last part of the game, I looked around like, ‘We can do something really special here,'” Lacayo said. “You can just tell the fans really love what’s going on here and it’s exciting to see what the future can hold.”
What’s next for the Strike Force
The squad will host the Arizona Rattlers in the Indoor Football League’s Western Conference championship game at 4:30 p.m. Sunday at Frontwave Arena with a spot in the league championship game on the line.
Arizona represents one of the biggest challenges remaining in San Diego’s postseason run. The Rattlers have been the standard in indoor football for more than three decades, winning seven championships since the franchise began play in 1992.
The Strike Force know firsthand how difficult the matchup will be. San Diego lost both regular-season meetings against Arizona this season, falling 49-27 on the road in Week 3 and 65-36 at Frontwave Arena in Week 17.
The Western Conference championship also will serve as a rematch of last year’s opening-round playoff thriller, when San Diego escaped Arizona with a 49-48 victory after a controversial final sequence on a Davis game-tying touchdown pass, before a Lacayo game-winning extra point.
Rattlers head coach Kevin Guy was adamant afterward that the game should not have ended that way.
“It just seems like we always get screwed at home at the end,” Guy said after the game. “I don’t really give a (expletive) if the league fines me or not.”
The IFL later acknowledged that a pre-snap penalty — three or more players were not set at the snap — should have resulted in a 10-second runoff that would have ended the game, but league rules prevented the result from being overturned.
Of Sunday’s re-match, Genuser said, “It’s one of those games where every single snap is tactical. We have to use our challenges correctly. We can’t allow their quarterback to extend plays, we can’t turn the ball over and we can’t miss kicks. It’s going to be one of those games where whoever has the least amount of turnovers is going to win.”
“The young guys who don’t know the arena game, and then they hear who Arizona is, they have this intimidation,” Lacayo said. “But there’s a couple of us who have been in the Arizona program. We know what it’s like. We know what it is, and they’re human just like anybody else. We’ve beaten them before. We’ve beaten them last year in the most important game.”
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