Matt Williams was walking away.
The Texas Tech student was near the end of the long ramp leading from the football field back to the stands at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. Williams was ready to retake his seat off to the side of the end zone, prepared to return to being a normal college student — albeit a slightly richer one.
Williams was on the phone with his mother, who was also inside the stadium that September night to watch the Red Raiders host Massachusetts. They relived the unforgettable experience Williams had just had: Winning a contest at random. Getting pulled onto the field in front of 53,190 fans. Draining a 30-yard field goal to win free rent.
Seconds before Williams reached the end of the ramp, a Texas Tech assistant strength and conditioning coach caught up with him.
“Hey,” he greeted Williams. “Leach wants to talk to you.”
Williams’ head spun. Mike Leach? The Red Raiders’ head coach? Yeah, right.
“What do you mean, ‘Leach wants to talk to me?”’ Williams said.
The Tech staffer explained. Williams told his mom, who hung up. He walked back down the ramp.
Five weeks later, he was kicking for Texas Tech.
Thanks to Leach’s willingness to take a chance, the man who thought his football career was over spent part of the 2008 season and all of 2009 and 2010 as a kicker for the Red Raiders.
“I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Williams told The Dispatch. “I loved every second of it.”
More than a decade after his impromptu tryout and the whirlwind that followed, Leach is again in search of a kicker at MSU. And his one-time “diamond in the rough” knows he’ll find the right man.
After all…
“There’s kickers everywhere,” Williams said.
Blocking out the noise
At Weatherford High School, outside of Fort Worth, Williams was one of them.
Much like at Tech, he took over the starting job midway through his sophomore season and held it through his senior year in 2005. That season, he came up big with a 49-yard kick to send a game against Mineral Wells into overtime before winning it with a 30-yard field goal.
That long-ago contest was on the road, but Williams didn’t care. He had a system for blocking out the noise.
Williams filled empty Coke cans with screws, small rocks and whatever would make the most noise. He tied them to his helmet at practice and kicked, the soda cans clanging like crazy.
“I did it to make as much noise around my head as possible, because I just knew I needed to focus on that one thing and not worry about all the noise outside,” Williams said.
Williams proved a productive high school kicker, but he soon found out the college game was on a different level. He walked onto the football team at Division II Tarleton State only to find himself buried on the Texans’ depth chart.
Disillusioned, Williams quit the team after just a month. He cried the day he decided to walk away from football.
“It was difficult because I’d never quit anything before, but at that point I just felt like that was what was best for me,” he said. “And of course, it was in the long run.”
After two years at Tarleton, Williams transferred to Texas Tech, where his brother Randy was a student. Less than a month after starting school, he signed up for a contest as he walked through the gates for the Red Raiders’ third home game of the season.
Williams had seen the promotional event before: Kick a 30-yard field goal and win free rent at Lynnwood Townhomes, a series of squat brick buildings on Belmont Avenue. He already had a place to live, but if he somehow won, he would probably sublet the apartment and pocket the money if the contest rules allowed.
During the third quarter, Williams was announced as the winner. As he walked down to the field after the period, he spotted behind the end zone some of his high school friends who also attended Texas Tech.
“Hey,” Williams yelled to them, buoyed by confidence and youth. “I’m going to kick you this ball.”
As it turned out, he was wrong.
He kicked it over their heads.
One of these days
Texas Tech players expected Williams to miss, much like the contest winners before him had. Former Red Raiders linebacker Brian Duncan said the stadium erupted with laughter each time the nervous kickers shanked their attempts or blasted them off the uprights.
“Every last one of them before (Williams) for sure sucked, for lack of a better term,” Duncan said.
Dressed in a black T-shirt, black shorts and simple tennis shoes, Williams didn’t look like the man who was about to change all that. But he lined up the kick as the PA announcer’s voice boomed out of the loudspeakers: “OK, Matt, whenever you’re ready, give it a shot.”
Williams took just one step before swinging his right leg toward the ball. Leach remembers well what happened next.
“It goes straight up and through,” the Bulldogs coach said. “The type of thing where if you just had a center and a holder and nobody blocking the defenders on the line of scrimmage, you still would’ve made it because it went up right away.”
Williams high-fived the contest rep on the field before walking off. Impressed, Leach turned to his staffers.
“Go get that guy,” he said. “I mean, what does it hurt? Stick him in the pile here.”
The coach who flagged down Williams brought him back to the sideline, where he waited a while before Leach finally walked over. The Tech head coach asked if Williams had ever done that before. He said he had.
“Have you ever thought about doing it for a D-I school?” Leach asked.
Williams had: He planned to try out for the Red Raiders when spring camp began. He said yes.
Leach invited Williams to come by his office that coming Monday to talk. Before leaving the stadium, Williams was interviewed on camera. His words proved prophetic.
“Maybe I’ll be kicking for Tech one of these days,” Williams said.
He arrived at the football offices that Monday, and special teams coordinator Clay McGuire got Williams all the equipment he needed to kick. He practiced field goals that same day and even lifted weights with the team.
Williams was in. But he still had to be cleared, a process that took quite a while. Because of Williams’ experience at Tarleton State, the NCAA had to determine whether he was recruited to the school. If he was, he would be ineligible to play that season.
Ultimately, the NCAA ruled that because Williams never talked to any Tarleton coaches before attending — his father had, instead — he wasn’t recruited. He received a one-time special exemption and was deemed eligible as a sophomore, his time with the Texans accounting for one year.
He also had to turn down the contest prize. So much for free rent at Lynnwood Townhomes.
A new nickname
Scholarship kicker Donnie Carona was struggling considerably to begin the 2008 season. Carona went 1 of 5 on field goals for Tech in the three games before Williams’ contest kick against UMass, missing two extra points to boot. The Red Raiders were 4-0, but they required improvement at kicker.
“It was no surprise that Leach would make a move to call him to get him out of the stands,” Duncan said of Williams. “We were desperate. We needed somebody.”
The fans did, too. Three weeks after his kick, Williams stood in the stands during a game against Nebraska as Tech missed an extra point in overtime.
“Didn’t we just get a guy on the team who was kicking extra points?” a member of the Red Raider faithful a row or two in front of him asked out loud.
“He’s standing right behind you,” Williams’ friend pointed out.
On Oct. 25 at Kansas, Williams’ turn finally came. And he crushed it, making all nine of his extra points in a 63-21 win in Lawrence.
“How about that?” Leach said Monday. “Nine in a row. We were pretty thrilled with that.”
Duncan said he, defensive tackle Rajon Henley and defensive end Brandon Williams helped bestow the moniker “Lynnwood” on Williams by the end of that first game. Every Tech player had a nickname — Duncan’s was “Pastor Dunc” because he prayed a lot and never cursed — so why not their new walk-on kicker?
“What would better suit him than ‘Lynnwood’ for the actual contest?” Duncan said.
It became Williams’ sobriquet for the rest of a productive Texas Tech career. The next week, he made two of three field goals and all four extra points against No. 1 Texas. The last-second touchdown catch by Michael Crabtree to give the Red Raiders a 39-33 win will be remembered most from the game, but Duncan said not to discount Williams’ impact.
“Him being able to make those put us where we needed to be to make a defensive stop and ultimately to make the legendary pass and catch at the end of the game,” Duncan said. “He didn’t fold. He stepped up to the plate.”
Williams didn’t kick another field goal in 2008, but he finished the year at a perfect 33 for 33 on extra points. In his three-season career, he missed just one of 150 PATs and went 22 for 28 on field goals.
By the end of the 2008 season, Williams said he felt confident in his job with the Red Raiders. After spending Monday and Tuesday nights in the hospital with meningitis after Texas Tech’s first loss of the season at Oklahoma, Williams showed up at practice. Leach had just one question for him.
“Can you take three steps and kick an extra point?” the coach asked.
“I’m going to try,” Williams replied.
Williams was cleared by doctors to practice that Thursday and kicked Saturday in a game against Baylor. He made all five of his PATs.
“That showed how much trust he had in me to do my job,” Williams said of Leach. “That was a pretty cool moment for me.”
‘It keeps you on your toes’
Despite that trust, Williams was still subject to competition during his time in Lubbock. Carona was still around, and Texas Tech brought in a couple other kickers.
Williams wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, saying the presence of competitors helped him sharpen his game.
“It keeps you on your toes,” he said. “When you get complacent, that’s when you make mistakes.”
Leach called for “open tryouts” after Saturday’s game at Arkansas, and Williams knows that will lead to a step up from freshman Nolan McCord and fifth-year senior Brandon Ruiz, who he said are still talented kickers who just have to relax after an 0-for-3 showing.
“I would be nervous and definitely motivated if I knew that someone could possibly take my job,” he said. “I would definitely be a little bit more motivated if I knew there was the possibility of somebody else coming in and taking that from me.”
Nowadays, Williams doesn’t have to worry about that. He teaches U.S. and world history at Mineral Wells High School — the same school he once defeated with his powerful right leg — and works as a special teams and defensive backs coach for the football team.
He’s even made some of his old soda-can contraptions for the Rams’ current kickers, who promptly asked him what the heck they were for.
“Oh, you’ll see one day,” Williams told them.
Mineral Wells safeties coach Brandon Jones recently posted a video of Williams knocking through a long field goal on Twitter, showing he still has the leg and the poise he once did. Jones tagged Leach in the video, the same move practiced by dozens of potential Bulldogs kickers looking for a chance.
Of course, Williams knows the difference between kicking a 50-yarder off a kicking tee with no one in sight and doing the same in a Southeastern Conference game.
“Can you go out in front of 80,000 people and do it and with a snap and with a hold and with timing and not taking your sweet time?” Williams said. “That’s a different story.”
It’s a story Williams knows well. If the Bulldogs do get a new kicker, he knows they’ll have the time of their life.
Just like he did.
“It’s a ride, and hopefully they enjoy it,” he said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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