Super Bowl Sooners: Instead of a repeat, Damien Williams chose family over football
Damien Williams
John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports
When the anthem is finished and the jets fly over and smoke from the fireworks wafts through Raymond James Stadium on Sunday in Tampa, Damien Williams’ heart will race.
Then maybe he’ll grab a snack, take a long draw from a cold beverage and ask his mom if he can get her anything.
Instead of playing in Super Bowl 55, the former University of Oklahoma running back is back home in Southern California, having made the decision last July to opt out of the 2020 season so he can help with his mother’s cancer treatments.
While his teammates made a triumphant return to Super Bowl 55, the man who last year made a good case for MVP of Super Bowl 54 has instead chosen family over football.
“For me, it was kind of cut straight and simple, right to it,” Williams said on an interview with SiriusXM after the news broke last summer. “I’m dealing with a family matter — my mom was diagnosed with cancer and it’s stage four. There was no other (choice) — that was my decision.”
Damien Williams
Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports
Williams hasn’t done any interviews since, but a source told SI Sooners this week that he is still very much at peace with his decision and is content with how events have unfolded.
Virleana Alexander is doing well at the moment. And why not? Her MVP is sitting right next to her.
Williams — at the peak of his professional career, in which running backs average less than four years in the NFL — acknowledged the difficulty of his decision.
“It was hard,” Williams told SiriusXM’s NFL Radio last July. “I sat down and talked to everybody in my circle, family and everybody close to me. My mom, she was just like, ‘Whatever decision, I’m behind you.’ At the end of the day, it’s hard. Football is my life, especially coming off a championship and wanting to do a repeat. Which, you know, I know they’re going to handle that. At the end of the day, it’s something personal I had to handle.”
Williams played at OU in 2012 and 2013 as a junior college transfer from Arizona Western College. He rushed for 946 yards and scored 12 touchdowns as a junior (he had 1,266 yards from scrimmage), then ran for 553 yards and scored seven TDs as a senior before Bob Stoops dismissed him from the team for failing a drug test. He played in just nine games in 2013 before heading off to pro football.
Much like his journey through high school and college, Williams’ NFL career has been uneven. His mother moved the family and he switched high schools twice in San Diego. He sat out a year to get his academics up. He didn’t qualify for Division I football and had to go to junior college. He got dismissed at OU. He spent four years with the Miami Dolphins and was told a new contract was coming, but then was suddenly jettisoned by Adam Gase. Kansas City picked him up mainly to play special teams, but then his role grew after Kareem Hunt’s release.
But in December 2018, Williams signed a two-year, $8.1 million deal with the Chiefs. The first person he called: his mom.
“At the end of the day,” Williams told the Kansas City Star in 2019, “I took the hard route.
“I’ve come a long way,” he told NFL.com’s Jim Trotter a year ago, just minutes after the Chiefs won the franchise’s first Super Bowl title in 50 years, “from starting out at junior college, going to Oklahoma, getting kicked off the team, not getting drafted, not getting re-signed by the Dolphins, then joining the Chiefs. I've had a long road, a long road.”
In last year’s win over San Francisco, Williams accounted for 133 total yards from scrimmage (104 rushing), and scored the team's last two touchdowns: a 5-yard TD catch from Patrick Mahomes with 2:44 left to give Kansas City its first lead of the second half, and a 38-yard TD run with 1:12 to play that finished it off.
Damien Williams at OU
Jim Cowsert-US PRESSWIRE
If he were playing this year, he could add to a postseason resume that includes 11 career playoff touchdowns, which ties the record set by Pro Football Hall of Famer Terrell Davis for most scrimmage TDs in a player’s first six games.
Instead, Williams is adding to his resume for the Family Man Hall of Fame.
“Man, listen. My mom was an only parent. Raised four kids,” Williams told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last August. “I have an older sister and two younger brothers. I seen my mom do it all. She can juggle it all. So you know, right now, I’m taking a pin away and I’m gonna do the juggling. I’m gonna handle it all right now.
“It most definitely will be (painful to not play). At the end of the day, I just feel like it’s just something I had to do. It’s something I’ve prepared for,” he said. “It’s something I’m ready for. It’s gonna be hard to watch, but I’m cheering at home, guys.”
