For Javarris Williams, choosing a school had everything to do with the opportunity to play his freshman year as much as it did with his desire to play in the NFL.
For Javarris Williams, choosing a school had everything to do with the opportunity to play his freshman year as much as it did with his desire to play in the NFL.
So it baffled some to learn that he turned down scholarship offers from several Big 12 schools including Texas, an institution with a long history of producing NFL players. Instead, he chose Tennessee State University, a school that, up until Williams’s freshman year, had most famously produced Ed “Too Tall” Jones.
But Williams wanted more. In December of 2008, he earned his bachelor’s degree in business information systems and by then, had rushed for 4,329 yards and 42 touchdowns in four seasons, and was named the Ohio Valley Conference Offensive Player of the Year in 2008, despite sitting out the last two games of his senior year with a hamstring pull.
When the folksy glitz of autumn Saturdays on Black college campuses fades for would-be NFL players, each begins a long road to draft day in which they will be evaluated against players from larger programs, whose names are often a part of the national sports lexicon. In comparison, top NFL draft prospects from HBCUs spend their college careers in relative obscurity.
Williams, however, wowed scouts with a 4.51 in the 40-yard dash at the NFL combine, which was better than the two best-known running backs in college football: the 4.59 of Ohio State’s Chris “Beanie” Wells, and that of Georgia’s Knowshon Moreno, who ran a 4.62. Wells and Moreno benched 225-pounds 25 times. And so did Williams.
“At first nobody knew who I was,” Williams said, saying that the other running backs seemed to address him differently. “Then after a few events everybody was, like, what’s good, J-Dub? Now I’m getting nicknames. I showed that I could hold my own.”
Alan Herman, Williams’s Manhattan-based agent, knew that the issue wasn’t just one of Williams holding his own but also about getting the right exposure.
“Javarris got into the East-West Shrine Game and played a huge role against Division I talent, dominating against Division I players,” Herman said. (Williams rushed for 56 yards and a touchdown in the game, a showcase for top prospects.) “Not only did he hold his own, but he looked damn good. So getting into those games is almost a must.”
Getting into even one of those games never happened for Tuskegee quarterback Jacary Atkinson, who led his team to a 22-1 record in the past two years. He was perhaps the most prolific offensive player in Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference – and the most recognizable name in all of Black college football – but none of it was enough to help him get invited to the combine.
“The NFL is notorious for making mistakes like this,” Atkinson’s agent, Harold Lewis, said, adding that of the players who participate in the combine, nearly half do not get drafted.
The real value in being invited to the combine is gaining an audience in front of each of the 32 team’s general managers, owners, scouts and coaches, Lewis said, and an audience is something HBCU players struggle to get. There were only three teams present at Tuskegee’s Pro Day: Jacksonville, Tennessee and the New York Giants.
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