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Demond Williams Jr.'s QB Coronation: Heavy Workload in Iowa

Originally posted on Washington Huskies on SI
By Dan Raley | Last updated Jan 20, 2025 11:48 AM ET

In a lopsided college football game in the middle of America, the University of Washington raised a white flag, ran it up the pole. For the first time during the season, coach Jedd Fisch permitted himself to look squarely to the future and nothing else.

Trailing Iowa 37-10 with 12:43 left to play -- at what represented the midpoint of the season -- the Huskies put the ball in the hands of freshman quarterback Demond Williams Jr., looking for a positive in the face of despair.

Fisch. while trying to make something out of his first season in Montlake after assembling a ragtag team, abandoned the status quo in order to concentrate on his extended UW football rebuild. All normal protocols were off. Even punting was out of the question.

With the ball at the Husky 29, Williams entered the game and went four-and-out. He threw a 4-yard pass to Cam Davis, an incompletion, another 4-yard pass to Denzel Boston and handed off to Davis for a 1-yard gain, coming up a yard short. Choosing not to kick the ball away, the UW ran out of downs on its own 38.

The 5-foot-11, 187-pound Williams became a sacrificial lamb in the face of progress. Yet things soon would get better for him in the heartland with Fisch insistent on making stuff happen with his freshman quarterback at the controls.

"I said to Demond, 'Let's just put together a drive, let's just not worry about how fast we can go, let's not worry about what it's going to look like,' " the coach recalled.

With all of the growing interest currently surrounding Williams following his two late-season starts and a sensational Sun Bowl performance, we're taking a look back at each of his 13 freshman appearances and what happened. This is the seventh installment. This was the first big jump for him in terms of a game-day workload.

Now trailing 40-10 after the Huskies gave away an easy field goal, Williams did what Fisch asked. He directed his team on a 17-play, 75-yard drive that required every ounce of his creativity and willpower to make it pay off.

Twice he converted on fourth down. After all, punting was out of the question now. He handed the ball to three different reserve running backs in Cam Davis, Daniyel Ngata and Sam Adams. He threw passes to five different receivers. Surprisingly, he ran the ball just once himself, for a 2-yard gain.

All of this lasted for six minutes and 47 seconds, coming to a positive culmination with the first-year signal-caller finding Rashid Williams in the end zone with a soft lob on a fourth-and-goal play from the 2.

Williams to Williams.

"I thought he did an excellent job," Fisch said of his quarterback.

The Husky coach previously used Williams at the beginning of the game, inserting him three different times on the the UW's opening drive, which covered 73 yards and was promising enough until Grady Gross' 32-yard field goal was blocked.

The first-year quarterback ran for 4 yards on the game's third snap, handed off to Jonah Coleman for 2 yards on the 11th and dumped a pass to Coleman for a yard on the 13th.

Early on, the message was don't sleep on this young guy because he can make plenty of stuff happen.

On the UW's second drive, Williams entered for the seventh play, faked a handoff and skirted the right side for a 17-yard gain to the Iowa 34, leading to a Husky touchdown to tie the game at 7.

While this game gradually got out of reach, with Iowa breezing to a 40-16 victory, Williams played well in his first extended college game time. He completed 12 of 16 passes for 71 yards and ran the ball three times for 23 yards. He took a season-high 25 snaps.

Williams gave the UW, feeling miserable about the present, something to think about for the future.

This article first appeared on Washington Huskies on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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