Alabama freshman receiver Ryan Williams grins as kids at a football camp in Tuscaloosa Saturday are asked if any of them are faster than he is. (Jimmy Wigfield/Call News)
TUSCALOOSA — The young men who got their butts caramelized by sitting on a sizzling football field and looking up at Ryan Williams on Saturday were audacious and maybe a little ahead of themselves, as Williams has always been with opponents, when they were asked a somewhat provocative, teasing question.
“How many of you are faster than Ryan?”
The hands of seven campers went up faster than Williams can run the 40. It’s doubtful seven SEC cornerbacks would have raised theirs, at least not publicly.
Williams saw some of himself in the children spread out before him at the camp and also recognized something that accelerates even more unrelentingly than he does.
“It shows you how fast time flies,” Williams said. “I’m honored to do it. Some day, these kids will be doing the same thing I’m doing.”
He thought back to when he sat where they sat and he reacted to the claims that there are 8-year-olds faster than he is with one of his joyful, incandescent smiles — the same smile that stretched across his face when he was no older than they are and proclaimed on videotape: “I’m Hollywood Williams and I’m the number one receiver in the nation.”
As with the kids at the camp, anything is possible for Williams, as few athletes have ascended so rapidly to the vantage point he now occupies.
Already known as Hollywood at the age of 6 — after he scored five touchdowns in a park game in Saraland — Williams has always striven to put on a show, which has steadily become more captivating, not counting the first time he caught a pass from his father with his nose. Bloodied but unfazed at the age of 4, Hollywood carried on.
“They forgot his real name,” Ryan Sr. said, but not why he earned it.
Years later, on the same field where Saturday’s camp was staged, Williams was pulverized while throwing a touchdown pass, came up with blood spurting from both nostrils, then proceeded to score two more touchdowns, giving him six in one game against Hillcrest High School.
So, he’s unassailably fast and tough but when most people think of him, it’s the speed in his first few steps which is otherworldly. University of Alabama fans can’t relate to it but can see it and claim it nonetheless, feeling he will be the next great player to carry their message of college football supremacy more spectacularly than anybody out there.
Williams hasn’t taken an official snap yet while wearing crimson jersey No. 2 but the Tide Nation has never been patient with slowly developing players or teams and Williams has never been one to ride the brakes.
At 17 the only player to twice be named the state’s Mr. Football, Williams graduated from Saraland High School a year early to begin his Alabama career. And there he was Saturday, back at Hillcrest for the first time since the show, the Big Bang, truly went statewide when he accounted for the six touchdowns in a playoff victory over the highly regarded Patriots on the way to the 2022 state championship. That night, he announced — with the same effect as tossing a live grenade into a barrel of fish — that he would dominate high school football for the next two years.
“I’m more polished now than I was then,” Williams said. “I was really good then but young.” As if he is now a metaphorical greybeard. “I was still making young mistakes on the field but now it doesn’t happen as much,” said the teenager who is well beyond his years.
Tide fans have rarely been this excited about a true freshman signee, and certainly not since Julio Jones, for good reason. Seldom has a five-star player with such fanfare arrived with a work ethic to match his talent. And it doesn’t matter to Williams how he contributes right away — in the receiver rotation or returning kicks — only that he contributes.
“I’m attacking every day,” Williams said. “I’m progressing 1 percent every day. So, if it’s catching punts or kickoffs, whatever it is, I’m ready to do it. … I really want to be a heavy factor, be a big part of it. Anything that I get to do to make that happen, I’m fine with.”
Williams will get plenty of chances to show what he can do in Kalen DeBoer’s offense, which he started learning by visiting spring practices in Tuscaloosa.
“Everything we’ve installed so far, I’ve got a good comprehension of,” he said. “But we get new plays that affect what we do all the time.”
Quarterback Jalen Milroe will likely thrive more than ever in the passing game under DeBoer. Williams said when he and Milroe work out, it’s more than aimlessly throwing a ball around.
“He’s really a technician,” Williams said. “Anytime we throw, it’s very structured. There is a purpose in everything he does every time. I’m very excited.”
Williams was also a quarterback before he was a wide receiver and his ability to run, catch and throw, either as a Wildcat quarterback or on reverses, jet sweeps and end arounds, will be well utilized by DeBoer.
DeBoer’s schemes and vision resulted in Williams signing with Alabama after he felt compelled to decommit when Nick Saban retired — an early recruiting triumph which soothed fans who were skeptical about him being good enough to follow Saban.
Many are hoping Williams is good enough to follow the long red line of great receivers under Saban, including Jones, Heisman Trophy winner DeVonta Smith, Jameson Williams, Jerry Jeudy, Amari Cooper, Calvin Ridley and Jaylen Waddle — each one an All-American and a first-round NFL Draft pick.
Williams wants to succeed as much for his family as for himself and he was reminded of that Saturday when his parents and brothers came to his first camp as a college football player.
Actually, his brothers did more than show up. Zaylon and Emery — whose nicknames “Fat” and “Chunk” completely conceal their athletic ability — were named the MVPs in their age groups. Their mother, CoCo, had her hands full carrying off their camp treasure.
Williams misses his family, of course, but also likes being on his own and even enjoys a respite from all the commotion caused by his siblings back home.
“I’ve always been in a house where I’d walk through the door and kids would be screaming,” he said. “Now, I can be in my own bubble, so I can think. It’s not to the point where I’m homesick. I’m sacrificing for what I want to do.”
Williams is cognizant that he isn’t the only one sacrificing.
“Make sure you thank the people who brought you out here,” Williams told the campers, who along with their parents endured temperatures nearing 100 degrees on the field. Cell phones overheated. The ground-up tires used for filler in the artificial turf were broiling to the touch, like tiny hot coals. The field smelled of burned rubber, perhaps a lingering remnant of the tire tracks Williams left behind that night in the 56-31 victory over Hillcrest.
While Williams could joke with some of the Patriots’ coaches helping with the camp about what he did to them in 2022 — “We’ve got a good relationship now but they were probably mad at me before,” he said — they looked for some sort of good-natured retribution during the 7-on-7 to end the sweltering day but found little to pick on.
Seizing on the fact Williams overthrew a receiver on his first attempt, one said, “Bad quarterback play! Get Milroe! Get K.J. Lacey!”
“It was my first pass,” Williams reminded them.
In typical Hollywood fashion, his team still won the 7-on-7.
“I didn’t have the cannon warmed up,” Williams joked. “They threw me out there. I had to see if I still had it.”
He still has it, as Tide fans will see.
