How Ryan Williams represents the future of college football, for better or worse

His eyes shaded beneath a white Georgia visor, his team minutes away from a crushing loss in Tuscaloosa, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart responded to a question about Tide rookie wide receiver Ryan Williams with a mix of fear and resignation .

“Great player,” Smart said of Williams, who had just fired up the Dawgs for a game-winning touchdown in Saturday night’s instant classic. “I mean, I was asked by the GameDay crew, 'What are you going to do specifically about Ryan Williams?' I said, “We can't do anything special with Ryan Williams.” “You've got a quarterback back there who could be the best running back in the country throwing the ball.” So you can't put two people on Ryan Williams. You can’t do it.”

Well, you couldbut Williams will just make them look silly, like he did on that monstrous go-ahead touchdown catch in which he caught the ball, spun, danced out of reach, and then accelerated into the end zone:

Williams caught six passes for 177 yards in Alabama's 41-34 thriller, including two of the most notable catches of the season – the go-ahead touchdown with 2:26 to play and a 54-yarder that was plucked out of the air:

It's still too early to say that Williams – who, as you may have heard once or twice, is still 17 years old – will be a generational player. But he already represents a generational shift in the empowerment of athletes. Williams is one of the first stars of an era in which both the transfer portal and NIL are not just elements of a player's career, but the foundation of an entire brand strategy. Williams, born in 2007, has never experienced a time when he was not in full control of his own playing destiny.

This is, as you've heard so often in recent years, the Wild West era of college football, a time when all the old rules have been thrown out and there are still no new rules – or “guardrails,” such as Coaches say – there. Players can jump from school to school via the portal and reap huge rewards through NIL. Sure, an Alabama can land a Ryan Williams… but can hold him?

Although Williams wasn't even born when Nick Saban came to Alabama and was supposed to be a senior in high school, he was already being recruited at three – three! – various occasions through the flood. As a 10th grader at Saraland High School near Mobile, he first committed to Alabama and turned down offers from Tennessee, Ole Miss, Auburn and Michigan, among others. Williams later transferred from the class of 2025 to the class of 2024 and enrolled early at Alabama.

But a commitment doesn't deter committed pursuers, and several schools, including Auburn, pushed hard to get Williams to commit. The Tigers invited Williams to the Iron Bowl last year, and as he recalled earlier this season, it almost made him a Tiger.

“I was just flirting with Auburn, and the Iron Bowl came up, and before the game they said, 'If we win, you're going to line up at midfield and we're going to rush the field,'” Williams told the New Wave Podcast. “I’m at Auburn. This is an Auburn visit. It's 4:31 and when I say I was shaking in my boots in the stands…”

Williams said he tries to be a good guest: “I entertain them. I say, 'Yes, I'm a runner.' I'll do it.' I didn't want to do it, man. The next thing you knew, he threw it…” And the entire state of Alabama knows what happened next.

Oh, but the recruitment wasn't over yet. After Nick Saban retired in January, the Poachers picked up the Alabama roster, including the players who weren't yet fit. Williams left Alabama immediately, less than two hours after Saban announced his retirement, and the five-star gold rush was underway.

Alabama hired Kalen DeBoer to replace Saban, and DeBoer immediately set about getting Williams back on the roster. “He was a priority from the beginning,” DeBoer told The Paul Finebaum Show this week. “There were no transfers that we had to pick up. … Ryan was definitely a high-priority guy in the state, and we got there as quickly as we could.”

With some help from Tide players, coaches and personnel managers who made Williams feel comfortable re-committing, Alabama brought its future game-breaker back in house. Everything worked out well for Alabama, but it's not hard to imagine that things could have gone very differently for the Tide, just as they did at other schools – including DeBoer's former employer, Washington.

Now it's fair to believe that this state of affairs is perfectly fine and a welcome setback for the more than a hundred years of unpaid labor that have made college football a multi-billion dollar behemoth. The players had fewer rights to their own autonomy than anyone else on campus. Professors and fellow students could leave the university without penalty, and, God knows, coaches had no problem dropping out when the going got tough at one institution and greener pastures beckoned at another.

Williams is at the forefront of a wave of young future stars who will be able to shape the world of college football in their own image. It's a frightening prospect for those accustomed to total control, and you don't have to look far – like in the suites at Bryant-Denny Stadium on game day – to see who isn't exactly thrilled about these changes.

The expectation in Tuscaloosa is that Williams will be Tide for Life, that his miraculous touchdown will be immortalized in a Daniel Moore painting that will hang on walls across Alabama for decades to come. But then again, they said that about Isaiah Bond, who caught the infamous fourth-and-31 Gravedigger pass in the Iron Bowl last year — and Bond was apparently on the run for Texas just minutes after Saban's departure.

So it's not out of the question that DeBoer and Alabama will have to recruit Williams three or four more times before he leaves Tuscaloosa. More likely, the stars of a team experiencing a downturn – say, Georgia or Ole Miss, which loses three games – suddenly decide to take their talents to a more successful program. And of course there will be collectives ready to sweeten the pot for five-star companies that want to make a move.

Because as Georgia learned Saturday, catching a guy like Ryan Williams is one thing. Holding onto him is a whole other challenge.