The Secret to Will Anderson Jr.'s Quick Rise at Alabama? Family, and Anger

The sophomore linebacker is just like you and me … except while playing football. And no one knows his two sides better than his five older sisters.

In some ways, Will Anderson Jr. is just like us.

For instance, did you wait until the last minute to do your holiday shopping? Will Anderson did, too. The Alabama linebacker maneuvered department store aisles to find gifts for his family’s annual Secret Santa. He waited until the day before Christmas Eve.

“There is nothing in the stores,” he recalls during a phone call last week while riding in his hulking pickup truck, “but every store is crowded!”

We’ve all been there.

Anderson has hobbies like the rest of us, too. He likes to fish. No, he loves to fish. He used to play hooky from school and then escape with one of his uncles to a fishing hole near their Georgia home, drop a line in the murky water and wait for a fish to bite. He also is a self-proclaimed Chick-fil-A kid and a big fan of the Waffle House All-Star Special (really, who’s not?).

Anderson was a unanimous first team All-American this year :: Butch Dill/USA TODAY Sports

He’s from a giant family—seven paternal uncles and five older sisters—and they all, at one time or another, made baby Will the target of pranks. They once shoved him in a dryer. They spent one year parading him around the backyard in a giraffe costume. They made him eat mayonnaise and jelly sandwiches. One sister even accidentally dropped a dumbbell on 4-year-old Will’s toe, fracturing it. (Years later, this remains a contentious matter among the family. Did she do it on purpose or not?)

Like all of us, Will’s heart has been broken. He lost his 84-year-old grandmother, a victim of pneumonia and other ailments, as he was starting his freshman year at Alabama. Earlier this season, one of his high school teammates, Adonis Butler, a Division II football player at Albany State, was killed when a transit bus hit him while he was walking on campus. Anderson doesn’t talk about such things, burying them deep down, to unearth them only to those he loves.

Anderson is like all of us—except, of course, when he’s on the football field. There, he is not like anyone at all.

He is unrecognizable, willfully using his body as a battering ram, a fearless dart of a player who leads the nation in tackles for loss (32.5) and sacks (15.5). He is a substantial reason why the Crimson Tide (12–1) won the SEC championship and are the top seed in the College Football Playoff entering Friday’s semifinal game against Cincinnati (13–0) in the Cotton Bowl. He is here because of his talent but also because of how he plays the game—his high school and college nicknames were “The Hammer” and “The Terminator,” respectively.

Anderson isn’t decked in military gear and heading into war, but he is playing the most physical of positions in one of America’s most dangerous sports. He competes with such aggression, it brings to tears one of his sisters.

“I try not to get emotional, but he will put his life on the line for anybody,” says Shanice, the second-oldest of his five sisters. “He goes hard for his teammates and his family.”

Anderson with his parents, Tereon and Big Will / Courtesy of the Anderson family

His style of play—angry—comes from his father, Will Anderson Sr., a.k.a. Big Will, who once told his son, “No, you can’t hit your sisters, but you can hit the boys on the football field.” No one fires up Will like his dad. Big Will was notorious for screaming critiques of his son across the football field during high school games just to spark aggression.

Coach, take him out! You missed that tackle! You’re not playing hard!

Son would glance toward Dad, seething through his facemask. “I used to make him really mad,” Big Will says with a laugh. “Next thing I know, he’d make some big play.”

Will’s meteoric ascension this year among college football’s elite stunned much of the sport, himself included. “I expected it to be good, but it kind of even surprised me a little bit,” he says.

But should we be so amazed? This is a player who tallied 22 sacks as a senior in high school, a pass-rush specialist who was unblockable at the prep level and routinely beat some of the country’s best offensive linemen during camps and clinics. His recruitment went much like his college career so far: It started out quiet and then soared. Within a few months, Anderson rose nearly 60 spots in 247Sports’s individual player rankings, from 64th to No. 5. From four-star to five-star.

Last year, he became the first true freshman to start at linebacker during Nick Saban’s tenure in Tuscaloosa. A ho-hum year of production as a rookie turned into an elite season as a sophomore, so good he surged into the Heisman Trophy conversation during the back half of the regular season. He won the Bronko Nagurski Trophy, presented annually to the nation’s top defensive player. He was named a unanimous All-American and an All-SEC first team member, and was honored as a permanent Alabama team captain.

“I'm not saying he doesn’t have flaws,” Alabama defensive coordinator Pete Golding says, “but I ain’t found one.”

Without a runaway offensive player in November, some wondered whether Anderson or another defensive player could win the game’s most prestigious individual honor, but he didn’t even make the cut of finalists who traveled to New York. A defensive player did make the list, but on a different Playoff team: Michigan’s Aidan Hutchinson. Anderson finished fifth in the voting, and he acknowledges that it made him a “little upset.” His omission led to him trending on Twitter.

Anderson’s group text chain with his siblings was quite active when the Heisman Trust revealed the voting results. “We were disappointed he got snubbed,” Shanice says. “I told him, ‘Now they’re going to feel you. It’s time to kick it up another notch.’”

There’s another notch? Well, one Alabama staff member describes it as Jekyll and Hyde. Composed, polite choir boy off the field and monster on it. If anyone knows those two sides, it is Shanice and the rest of the Anderson sisters. Tereon Anderson birthed five girls in less than eight years. There is the oldest, Shawnta; No. 2, Shanice; then Chyna (she accidentally dropped the dumbbell), Endia and Teria (she locked Will in the dryer).

They shaped Will into the man he is today. Teria, a hair stylist, is just two years older than Will. They are “goofy” together, he says. He shares his spiritual side with Endia, a flight attendant; with Chyna, a teacher, it’s music—they love ’90s R&B. Shawnta, a conversation analyst, steers him in business advice, and Shanice, a brand designer, is Will’s movie pal, closest confidant, TV buddy and soon the developer of his personal logo.

The six kids split two rooms in a three-bedroom home in Hampton, Ga., about 40 minutes south of Atlanta. Three to each room. However, during most mornings, all six would be in one room. One year during a talent show at his elementary school, Will forgot his lines and the entire group of sisters ran to the stage to help their weeping brother. Sure, they also joked and pulled pranks, but the group is as close as any. They all love their little brother.

Anderson is the youngest of six siblings / Courtesy of the Anderson family

If raising six children separated in age by about 10 years sounds tough, well, it was. The older sisters helped raise the younger ones. And they all helped raise Will. “It was fun. I got terrorized. Crying a lot,” Anderson says, “but it was all worth it.” But Big Will acknowledges his preference for a boy well before most of the girls came along.

“Each time we had girls, I was hoping it was a boy, especially the last two,” Big Will says, chuckling. “One of the last ones came out peeing and it was going straight up in the air and I was like ‘It’s a boy!’”

It was another girl. Then came Will.

“He was different,” Tereon says. “There was no putting on TV or a movie. Everything was jumping off the sofa and running around the house.”

When Will turned 4, his parents registered him for any and every sports camp they could. This led, of course, to football. Big Will recalls taking his son to one of his first parkball camps. The coach watched Will run, jump and tackle and then raced to the other fields to round up the other coaches. You gotta see this kid! They all gathered around him in awe.

For years, Will’s family fudged his age so he could play parkball with the older kids. One year, camp officials learned of it and sent him back down. Big Will asked the officials if they were sure they wanted to do that. They were.

“Well, he ran all over those kids,” Big Will recalls.

It took time, but with coaching and help from a pair of trainers, Will eventually learned to harness his innate athletic ability. Dwight Johnson, a former NFL defensive end who played at Baylor, taught Anderson technique and hand moves, more of the old-school approach. Marcus Howard, a former Georgia defensive end, worked with him on explosion and speed, more new-age training tactics. There was also Anderson’s uncle, Kendall, himself a former defensive lineman who played briefly at the small college level.

“Like Will, I had a really quick step. I’d blow past the linemen and I was in the backfield,” Kendall Anderson recalls. “I never wanted to stop playing defense when I started because I loved hitting kids. Same as Will.”

The biggest shift in Will’s career was a position move that came before his sophomore year of high school. He entered Dutchtown High as a fullback and running back. Will Rogers, then in his first year as Dutchtown’s defensive coordinator, needed only to look at the boy to know where he belonged. Rogers, a former defensive lineman at Mississippi State, asked Anderson, “You know what SEC defensive ends look like?”

“No,” Anderson replied.

“They look like you, son.”

After missing his entire freshman season while recovering from knee surgery, Anderson started as a sophomore. He led arguably the state’s best high school defense as a junior and senior, doing much of the same things he does now. Despite opponents running away from him or double-teaming him, he beat blockers down the line with his speed and tore through guards and tackles with his strength.

It is his first step that’s so incredible, Rogers says. At Dutchtown High, Anderson was such a force, coaches wouldn’t allow him to practice on Tuesdays because they’d get nothing done offensively. “He’d screw every drill up,” Rogers laughs. “Unblockable.”

Tereon Anderson thinks back to Rogers moving her son from offense to defense, a shift she at first did not approve of.

“Whew, it’s a good thing he didn’t listen to me,” she says. “Every time I see Coach Rogers I tell him, ‘Thank you.’”

Rogers and Will remain close. They talk weekly and text. He helped Anderson create his very first list of football goals while in high school and the linebacker keeps up the tradition in college, hiding the handwritten list between his cellphone and its hard case. Anderson recently told Rogers it was time to make a new list—he had checked off all of the goals this year. Rogers is also there for Anderson during life’s ups and downs.

Anderson with his late grandmother, Betty / Courtesy of the Anderson family

Anderson was in his third month at Alabama when his paternal grandmother, Betty, died. The two were so close, Anderson once convinced his parents to move him from one middle school to another so he could live with his grandmother for a year. After football games, he’d crawl into her small bed, his feet hanging off the edge, and they would talk as he drifted to sleep.

“Will used to put it as, ‘No one understands me like my grandma,’” Big Will says.

Betty raised Big Will and his six brothers, mostly alone, her husband dying when Big Will was 6 years old. They lived in the projects of Atlanta and Betty worked two or three jobs. She’d often bring her youngest two boys, Kendall and Big Will, with her to a night job of cleaning office buildings. Her boys got to say goodbye to her the night before she died. Will never got the chance.

“It affected him that whole season last year,” Big Will says. “I’d get phone calls from him and he was torn up crying. I’d tell him things will be alright and he knows what his grandma would expect of him.”

So, what’s next? On the field, it is repeating as a national champion. Off the field, it is … well, it is being one of us. Anderson wants to travel, see new places and experience new things. He recently took his first ride on a private jet when he flew to an awards ceremony. His mom said he freaked out as the eight-seater took off.

He is like one of us. A chill little brother. A promising son. A fun nephew. A grieving grandson.

And then not like us at all, when he is a torpedo on the football field.