True freshmen? True story: Alabama's Ryan Williams and Ohio State's Jeremiah Smith are taking over college football
Ryan Williams won’t be 18 until 3 weeks after the national title game is played.
Jeremiah Smith won’t be 19 until the day before Michigan comes to The Horseshoe.
We’re not even at Week 6 of their true freshman seasons and already the teenage sensations have become the centerpieces of their program’s potent passing games.
Williams is the wunderkind revelation on the new No. 1 team in college football.
Smith is the speedy scoring machine on the No. 3 team in college football.
Together, they are turning the sport on its ear through the opening month of the 2024 season, one breathtaking catch and one clutch touchdown grab at a time.
Success was expected. Smith was the No. 1 overall prospect in the 2024 recruiting class. Williams was No. 8.
But this? The 5-stars already are exceeding those outlandish expectations.
Williams willed Alabama to victory over Georgia in last Saturday night’s (so far) Game of the Year with a scintillating 75-yard catch-and-run touchdown that is already part of Crimson Tide lore. His go-ahead score helped Bama prevent a 4th-quarter collapse in a 41-34 victory that unofficially kick-started the Kalen DeBoer era and officially made one of the most demanding fan bases in sports fall in love with a 17-year-old kid from Mobile.
Meanwhile, roughly 625 miles to the north in Columbus, Ohio, Smith has helped ease the angst of another wonderfully neurotic fan base that didn’t know what Ohio State’s passing game would look like this season after Kyle McCord bolted for Syracuse and Will Howard arrived from Kansas State to run Chip Kelly’s complex offense. Four games in, Howard is already over 1,000 yards passing and an 18-year-old stud from South Florida who’s already built like a stallion has Buckeyes fans speculating that Smith could have the greatest freshman season in Ohio State’s rich football history.
It’s downright fitting that in a year when college football has officially entered a new, strange realm, when Texas and Oklahoma have crashed the SEC while USC and UCLA have somehow landed in the Big Ten, for heaven’s sake, that 2 of the sport’s biggest name brands in Alabama and Ohio State are being galvanized by freshmen who refuse to play like freshmen.
The cool reality is that Williams and Smith are playing like stars. FOX college football analyst Joel Klatt thinks the world of Williams, but he’s already making a case that the 6-3, 215-pound Smith is the best wide receiver in college football. Klatt was raving on his show in the aftermath of Week 5, when Williams scored the biggest touchdown of the college football season to date and Smith lit up the Michigan State defense with 5 catches for 83 yards and a one-handed 17-yard TD catch to go with a 19-yard scoring run on an end-around, going untouched on the play to help Ohio State cruise to victory in East Lansing.
The numbers for Williams and Smith are even more eye-popping when you consider they’ve each only played 4 games, with Bama and Ohio State already having byes. Williams leads the Tide with 16 catches, and his 462 yards receiving are over 300 more than the next guy on Alabama’s list. Williams also has half of the Crimson Tide’s 10 touchdown receptions this season. He’s already far and away Jalen Milroe’s No. 1 target.
Like Williams, Smith already leads Ohio State in yards receiving with 364 on 19 catches. And incredibly, just like Williams, Smith has exactly half of Ohio State’s 10 touchdown catches so far this season.
Only 7 receivers in America have more TD catches than these dynamic freshmen do.
The thing Smith has in Columbus that Williams doesn’t in Tuscaloosa is a dominant wideout on the other side of the field in senior Emeka Egbuka, who is right there with Smith with his team-leading 21 catches for 362 yards and 2 TDs.
You think Egbuka is glad he stuck around long enough to play with a talent like Smith?
“The guy is absolutely insane,” Klatt said about Smith. “He is physically the most gifted person on the football field, every time he’s on the field. He’s fast. He’s got incredible body control. He’s a great worker. He’s got a phenomenal attitude, and his hands are unreal.”
Alabama and Ohio State’s shiny new offensive toys are uncommon and undaunted. Williams’ touchdown catch against Georgia prevented what would’ve been one of the biggest collapses in college football history, considering the stakes and the stage, and Smith’s performance came in the first road game of his brief Buckeyes career. He single-handedly turned a 10-7 second-quarter struggle in a hostile Big Ten environment and made it a comfortable 24-7 game at the half.
Both phenoms are turning defenses sideways and turning heads on their own sidelines.
“He has all the intangibles that you want in a prototypical receiver,” Egbuka told reporters of Smith, who was 15 years old when Egbuka was launching his career in Columbus.
DeBoer helped convince the 6-foot, 175-pound Williams to come to Bama after he pulled his commitment in the wake of Nick Saban’s retirement. It took exactly one remarkable performance in the opener for DeBoer to see there was something special about him.
“Just, you know, really focused and just doesn’t seem like the game’s too fast for him,” marveled DeBoer after Williams caught an 84-yard TD pass in the 1st quarter of his 1st game at Alabama, then added a 55-yard scoring pass in the 2nd quarter. “So, it was impressive that a guy his age can go out there and do the things he’s doing.”
Williams doesn’t act or perform like the youngest player in the FBS, and he would still be in high school right now if he didn’t make himself college-eligible at age 17 by graduating early from Saraland (Alabama) High School and reclassifying to 2024. And Smith would be somewhere else, too, like Georgia or USC, which both went after him hard, or he could’ve stayed in state and gone to Miami, Florida or Florida State had he not chosen to continue Ohio State’s rich wide receiver lineage.
Ironically, Greg McElroy, a former Alabama quarterback, recently compared Smith to ex-Crimson Tide star wideout Julio Jones, who caught passes from McElroy at the beginning of the Saban dynasty. McElroy sees similar on-field traits between Smith and Jones, and also links them together because of the early hype surrounding both.
“This guy (Smith) comes in with all sort of fanfare,” said McElroy, a college football analyst for ESPN. “He reminds me very much of a guy like Julio Jones. Just big, physical, looks the part. He looks like he’s 28 years old when he’s just 18 or 19.”
No, Smith isn’t 19 yet, and Williams will still be 17 for a while longer.
In one unforgettable month, they’ve become household names in college football.
They’ve already arrived, ahead of schedule and ahead of their time.