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

His eyes shaded under a white Georgia visor, his team just minutes removed from a crushing defeat in Tuscaloosa, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart reacted to a question about Tide freshman wide receiver Ryan Williams with a mixture of dread and resignation.

"Great player," Smart said of Williams, who had just torched the Dawgs for a go-ahead, game-winning touchdown in Saturday night's instant classic. "I mean, I got asked by the GameDay crew, 'What are you going to do special about Ryan Williams?' I said, 'We can't do anything special with Ryan Williams. They got a guy back there at quarterback who could be the best running back in the country and he throws the ball.' So, you can't put two people on Ryan Williams. You can't do it."

Well, you could, but Williams will just make them look silly, as he did on that infamous monstrous go-ahead touchdown catch, where he caught the ball, spun, danced out of reach, then accelerated into the end zone:

Williams caught six passes for 177 yards in Alabama’s 41-34 thriller, including two of the most remarkable catches of the season — that go-ahead touchdown with 2:26 remaining in the game, and a bobbled, snatched-from-the-air 54-yarder:

It’s too early to say 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 athlete empowerment. Williams is one of the first stars of an era where both the transfer portal and NIL are not just elements of a player’s career, but the bedrock of an entire brand strategy. Williams, born in 2007, has never known a time when he wasn’t in complete control of his own playing destiny.

This is, as you've heard so many times in recent years, the Wild West era of college football, a time when all the old rules have been thrown out and no new rules — or "guardrails," in coachspeak — yet exist. Players can hop from school to school through the portal, and can reap massive rewards through NIL. Sure, an Alabama can land a Ryan Williams … but can it keep him?

Even though Williams wasn’t even born when Nick Saban came to Alabama and ought to be a high school senior, he’s already been recruited on three — three! — separate occasions by the Tide. He first committed to Alabama as a 10th grader at Saraland High School near Mobile, turning down offers from Tennessee, Ole Miss, Auburn and Michigan, among others. Williams later reclassified himself from the class of 2025 to the class of 2024, enrolling early at Alabama.

But a commitment doesn’t scare off dedicated pursuers, and several schools, including Auburn, were pushing hard to get Williams to flip. The Tigers invited Williams to last year’s Iron Bowl, and as he recalled earlier this season, he very nearly became a Tiger as a result.

“I was just flirting with Auburn, and the Iron Bowl came and before the game, they was like, ‘When we win, you’re gonna commit at center field, and we rushin’ the field,” Williams told the New Wave Podcast. “I’m at Auburn. This is an Auburn visit. It’s 4th and 31, and when I say I was shaking in my boots in them stands…”

Williams said he was trying to be a good guest: "I'm entertaining them. I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm'a run. I'm gonna do it.' I didn't wanna do it, man. Next thing you knew, he threw it...." And the whole state of Alabama knows what happened next.

Oh, but the recruiting wasn’t done. After Nick Saban retired in January, the poachers came for the Alabama roster, even those players who hadn’t suited up yet. Williams immediately decommitted from Alabama less than two hours after Saban announced his retirement, and the five-star gold rush was on.

Alabama hired Kalen DeBoer to replace Saban, and DeBoer immediately set out to bring Williams back into the fold. "He was a priority right off the bat," DeBoer told The Paul Finebaum Show this week. "There was not going to be transfers for us to go bring in. … Ryan was certainly a priority in-state guy, and we made a trip down there as quickly as we possibly could."

With some help from Tide players, coaches and personnel managers who made Williams feel comfortable recommitting, Alabama brought its future gamebreaker back in-house. Everything has worked out just fine for Alabama, but it's not hard to see how this could have gone very differently for the Tide, just as it has at other schools — DeBoer's former employer, Washington, included.

Now, it’s entirely possible to believe that this state of affairs is perfectly fine and a welcome pushback to the literal century-plus of unpaid labor that built college football into a multibillion-dollar behemoth. Players had fewer rights to their own autonomy than anyone else on campus. Professors and fellow students could jump schools without penalty, and lord knows coaches have had no problem bouncing when the road gets tough at one institution and greener pastures beckon at another.

Williams is on the leading edge of a wave of young future stars who will be able to shape the college football world in their own image. It’s a terrifying prospect to those accustomed to total control, and you don’t have to look far — like, just up into the suites at Bryant-Denny Stadium on game day — to see who’s not exactly thrilled with these changes.

The presumption around Tuscaloosa is that Williams will be Tide for Life, that he'll get his miracle touchdown immortalized in a Daniel Moore painting that will hang on walls all over Alabama for decades to come. But then again, they said that about Isaiah Bond, who caught the infamous fourth-and-31 Gravedigger pass in last year's Iron Bowl — and Bond was out the door to Texas seemingly within minutes of Saban's departure.

So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that DeBoer and Alabama will need to recruit Williams three or four more times before he leaves Tuscaloosa. More likely is that the stars of a team that takes a downturn — a Georgia or an Ole Miss that loses three games, say — will suddenly decide they’d like to ply their talents at a more successful program. And there will naturally be collectives ready to sweeten the pot for five-stars looking to make a move.

Because, as Georgia learned on Saturday, catching up to a guy like Ryan Williams is one thing. Holding onto him is another challenge entirely.