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After a few delays getting the show on the road, the Ducks defense rolls into Corvallis with stellar reviews for a recent performance
EUGENE — Bennett Williams was searching for something.
He cracked a grin and then, after a brief pause to corral the words he’s been looking for, began painting the picture.
“This week I’m starting to see it,” Williams said. “This defense can be so good and we’re starting to play with that fast pace, that confidence where it just happens and you know that the person next to you knows what they’re doing, so then you have full trust in what you’re doing. And it’s really starting to click right now.”
Williams told The I-5 Corridor this days before the team’s 37-34 loss to Washington, a game in which the Ducks allowed 522 yards and big play after big play. And while his assessment may have missed the mark in the moment, the inkling wasn’t entirely off, either.
Just one week later, after the defense endured days of condemnation, they got that “signature” performance in a 20-17 win over Utah.
Better late than never.
The defense poured water over Utah’s physical ground attack, dousing Utes’ quarterback Cameron Rising who, after having his way in a pair of big brother wins over Oregon last season, looked entirely mortal Saturday, throwing for 4.5 yards per attempt, no touchdowns and three interceptions.
For the first time all season, Oregon’s defense saved its offense, and with it kept Rose Bowl hopes alive and well. Williams, of course, was at the center of it all, where he’s been all season for this defense, accepting the brunt of the blame for losses — whether deserved or not — and making crucial plays in the wins.
He shadowed Utah’s star tight end Dalton Kincaid up and down Autzen throughout the frigid evening and came away with 14 tackles and a pair of interceptions to show for it.
“Those big moments, I feel like I’m made for that,” Williams said postgame, still clutching the footballs he intercepted, one under each arm.
He went on: “Last week, I wasn’t able to make the play, but as long as you own it… That’s what enabled me this week to go out there and not have that fear.”
It’s not a stretch to call Williams the spokesperson for this iteration of Ducks football. No player has been rolled out to the media more frequently, nor delivered more insightful words.
How did he become so comfortable in front of the cameras? His mother Dani Slavin insists it was her and her husband Garey Williams’ decision that Bennett and his brother Evan enroll in drama classes throughout middle school.
Although, she added, Williams might be mad at her for mentioning it.
The Williams brothers often earned lead rolls. The Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz and Gaston in Beauty and the Beast are some of her personal favorite performances from Bennett.
Rest assured, she has the old videotapes ready to queue up if need be.
“It so helps with your confidence in front of people,” she said. “If you can sing and dance in front of your friends, you’re gonna have a level of confidence in front of anyone when that microphone is in front of your face. I think that helped out, or at least I’m going to take credit for that.”
Williams agreed, albeit somewhat reluctantly.
“She would love to think so because she put me through it and she told me that it was going to pay off in the future,” he said. “But I do actually think it has. Being able to be in front of a lot of people, there’s fear that comes with that, especially at a young age, in middle school, but to be able to put on costumes and makeup and all this crap and be okay with slipping up or being embarrassed in front of people that’s fine because it’s just who you are.
“I had to sing in front of people. I’m not a good singer.”
Garey and Dani believed everyone in their household should be allowed to speak their opinion, regardless of age. They wrote off any modicum of a seen-but-not-heard mentality with their children.
“For Bennett, even as a young child, he’s always had a strong sense of fairness…,” Slavin said. “He struggled sometimes with hierarchical or patriarchal types of systems where you, ‘Do what I say,’ and don’t get the ability to have your opinion be welcomed or heard and I think here, coach Lanning and staff are hearing, and allowing them to have a voice.”
Under Lanning, Williams has blossomed as a function of the approach’s freedom. It’s just as much a function of personal growth.
A Bay Area kid, Williams starred at St. Francis High School in Mountain View, California, alongside former Oregon running back Cyrus Habibi-Likio.
Williams began his college career at Illinois in 2017. Head coach Lovie Smith’s defense lacked depth, springing Williams into a starting role as a freshman. And with the instant opportunity came instant production — Williams was named a freshman All-American.
That’s when things took their first major turn.
Viewed as a cornerstone of the Fighting Illini program entering year two, he was later kicked off the team for violating team rules.
“I think he may have gotten a little big-headed,” Garey said. “His time management
skills went out the window.”
“Not all storms come to disrupt your life, some come to clear your path,” Williams later wrote as part of a Twitter statement.
In this case his path forward, in a sense, meant a step backwards: A return to the Bay Area, a reunion with an old family friend and, above all, a clean slate.
Immediately succeeding the Illinois fallout, Williams called Tim Tulloch, an old family friend he and his brother had trained with in the high school who serves as head coach at the College of San Mateo — a JUCO football powerhouse.
“Hey, coach, this is not working out,” he told Tulloch. “I need a fresh start and I’d like to come home.”
“I’ve always kind of been in his corner,” Tulloch said of Williams. “I think it was the right place at the right time for him… Looking at moving forward, that’s all that mattered, and we were here to be a part of it.”
Tulloch recently received a call from a scout with one of the top teams in the NFL.
The scout felt as though Williams, the multi-positional defensive back who nearly went the Ivy League route before locking in his commitment to Illinois, could be a fit for their defensive scheme.
“We need extremely smart football players to run our system,” the scout told Tulloch. “He’s caught our eye.”
Smarts were always a strength of Williams’ and during his two-year stint at San Mateo, Tulloch and his staff made sure his role on the field reflected that.
“Bennett doesn’t turn out like Bennett by accident,” Tulloch said. “He was raised that way.
“He’s not one that stays stagnant. He’s constantly trying to evolve and get better.”
The defensive schemes at San Mateo are matchup based. Players like Williams swap roles and move positions based on the opponent’s personnel. They unlocked Williams’ versatility, rotating him between deep safety, box safety, nickelback and boundary cornerback.
He played all the parts.
“It’s the intangibles and the football IQ that really separates the guys that make the league and the guys that don’t, or the guys that get a second contract or a third contract,” said Tulloch, who coached former NFL receiver Julian Edelman, a player which made a living doing exactly that.
That vast field sense Williams developed has popped this season for the Ducks. Williams leads the team in both total (59) and solo tackles (40). He’s second behind only cornerback Christian Gonzalez with six passes defended and his pair of interceptions against Utah matched his two forced fumbles on the season.
It’s the types of plays he’s made this season that pushed Tulloch to recommend Williams when former Oregon head coach and a friend of Tulloch’s, Mario Cristobal, came calling in search of a safety ahead of the 2020 season.
“Mom, I broke my leg.”
The call caught Slavin off guard.
“I’m thinking, ‘Wait what? It’s Friday,” she said of the called she received last September from her son. “‘It’s walkthroughs, you don’t even hit each other, what is happening?””
After a torrid start to 2021 — three interceptions through four games — Williams broke his leg while decelerating during an onside kick drill at practice, just before the team left to face Stanford in Palo Alto. The team scheduled a surgery for him the following Monday and Slavin made the trip north to spend some time with her son, helping him acclimate to his new, restrictive lifestyle and ensuring he took his medication.
“Kids can get left behind sometimes because the team chugs along, right? They gotta go,” said Slavin, who has a background in sports medicine and physical therapy.
Slavin feels her eldest son has always had a strong sense of self. But the biggest jump in mindset and maturity he’s taken, she feels, followed the injury. A psychology major himself, Williams’ absence forced him to continue sharpening what was already a strength of his — the mental side of a sport rooted in physicality.
Williams embraced the idea of day-by-day improvement, not just with the health of his leg, but his own cognition. He found enlightenment in “The Mental Athlete” a book aimed at refining the minds of athletes.
“The biggest thing was just understanding how to get back to this like quiet space,” he said. “There’s so much crap going on all the time and you get caught up in how fast paced everything is, trying to stay on top of the next thing. You’re always most effective when you can find that calm center within yourself.”
Williams still leans on the habits he developed during rehab. Everyday after practice, he returns home and begins a personal body scan. It lasts between thirty minutes and an hour, sometimes longer.
“Where are my spots of tightness or soreness?” he asks himself. “Then thinking about, ‘Okay, how am I feeling? How is my mental state right now? Am I getting agitated at stuff a little quicker today?”
Next he reflects on what he has to be grateful for.
“It allows you to let everything else go,” he said. “And so that’s a big thing for me.”
On that day ahead of the Washington game, he admitted he hadn’t been feeling himself. His solution was to pick up the book once more and scout it for what he may have missed the first time through. He started to search for that calm space once more with the understanding his effectiveness is reliant on it.
“His journey has been just one of self discovery,” Slavin said.
And while the performance that came next may have been as close to rock bottom as he’s reached this season, much like his career arch, what succeeded his lowest point were his biggest moments on stage.
“This path that I’ve taken, It’s a long one and it’s a little more rough than people would have liked, maybe that I would have liked, but at the end of it, it made me who I am right now,” he said.
And just as he’s been since the days of middle school acting, before his three college stops and six position coaches in six seasons, he’s immensely comfortable with who he’s become.
— Shane Hoffmann
@shane_hoffmann
