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Saints RB
Ricky Williams
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Mike Ditka was right. Not that it’ll do him any good now.
Two years ago, Ditka was accused of having lost his mind when he traded his entire
draft for the opportunity to select Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams. It seemed like a
good idea at the time. But when Williams posed on a magazine cover in a wedding dress,
signed an odd, incentive-laden contract, then got hurt almost immediately after training
camp began and limped his way to only 884 yards in 12 games, it cost Ditka his job as the
Saints’ head coach. It also cost Williams his reputation as a hard-working power
runner you could build a team around.
When Williams turned out to be a loner without a friend and began complaining about the
city of New Orleans and the contract he once defended, his problems only worsened. So when
new head coach Jim Haslett took over this spring, the first thing he did was sit down to
talk with Williams. He gave him three suggestions.
He told him to stop wearing his helmet when he was being interviewed by the media
because he looked like a nut. He told him to stop talking about the town where he was
playing or about his contract and just worry about football. And he told him to run inside
the tackles, the way he used to at Texas, but not to feel he had to carry his whole team
with him.
Williams took Haslett’s advice, and Haslett did as well by importing QB Jeff
Blake, speedy WR Joe Horn and several other pass catchers to take some of the heat off the
running back this fall. The result has been that Ricky Williams suddenly became, well,
Ricky Williams.
After seven games, Williams has rushed for 772 yards and has amassed 1,044 total yards.
He rushed for 100 yards or more five straight games. He scored five more touchdowns
(seven) than he did the entire 1999 season. Most important, Ricky Williams made some
friends.
A year ago, he was the team’s only drafted rookie. If Ditka made any mistake, it
was that without a contemporary, Williams was a lonely loner. Always a bit of an
iconoclast, even at Texas, Williams’ personality seemed to have no place in the
Saints’ locker room, and he suffered alone with that. But this year Williams lives
with rookies Chad Morton and Terrelle Smith, so he has some guys to run with. That, one
could argue, has made all the difference in Williams both on the field and off because the
result has been easy to see.
"Ricky is really punishing people," C Jerry Fontenot says. That does not
include Morton and Smith, with whom he is thick as thieves, or even the media, with whom
he at least has an uneasy truce. But it does include anyone who tries to tackle him. The
only people in football he’s not punishing, it seems, are the Saints, who are now
overjoyed that Mike Ditka had the foresight to dump his entire draft for a future star
like Ricky Williams.
That is how it goes in the NFL. One year you’re an idiot or a bust. The next year
you’re a genius or a hero. Even though Williams has been running the way he did in
his Heisman Trophy season at Texas, the country has been slow to warm to his performances.
Last year Williams was regularly criticized for being injury prone, odd and
underproductive. This year, thus far at least, he’s been all but ignored by the
national media despite being on pace to erase the memory of Dalton Hilliard in New
Orleans.
Maybe that’s part of the problem. Playing in New Orleans, which has been in only
four playoff games in 34 years without winning any, little is expected and less is known
about the Saints once you get beyond Bourbon Street. Hilliard is their last 1,000-yard
rusher, and that was 11 years ago. If you remember him, you’re either a football
historian or from Baton Rouge.
Still, if Williams keeps running the way he’s been running, and the Saints’
defense continues to shut teams down the way it has thus far this season, somebody is
going to notice eventually — and it won't be because Ricky Williams is using his
helmet to deflect interviewers. It’ll be because he’s using it to deflect
tacklers.
Reputation is hard to change, and Williams, unfortunately, created a bad one for
himself last year, both by his play and by his actions. But if he averages merely 25.4
yards a game in the season’s final nine games, he will rush for 1,000 yards, and that
will not go unnoticed.
Just as important, this year he has run as well as anyone in football and limited his
headline-making to game day. If it continues, it will pay off for Williams and the Saints
because both his ability and his real personality will come to the fore. People will then
understand why Ditka took the risk in the first place — because Williams is a
reliable guy as well as a solid back.
A case in point came late in a 24-6 victory over the Panthers, a game in which Williams
rushed for 144 yards on 38 carries. With the game under control, Fontenot suggested
Williams take a break. Williams responded by putting his helmet back on, but before he
did, he told Fontenot, "My job is to carry the football."
Indeed it is, and if he continues to do it the way he has lately, Ricky Williams will
soon enough be back in the headlines. And it won’t be for wearing a wedding dress. It
will be for wearing out tacklers.
Ron Borges is a columnist for the Boston Globe. |
