Mike Williams came back to Austin for a Hall of Honor moment, but the former Texas offensive tackle made clear pretty quickly that he’d rather use the spotlight on his daughter.
Williams was inducted at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium alongside 11 other athletes and a coach, yet the conversation kept drifting away from his own football résumé and toward Mia Williams, his daughter, who was standing just outside the cluster of reporters.
That’s where Williams’ pride really showed. Mia is a wrestler with Olympic ambitions of her own, and Mike said she wants to follow the path of her coach, Jordan Burroughs. He rattled off her athletic feats with obvious delight - she can flip, she can run six miles - and added that she’s already a better athlete than he ever was.
For a player whose college career started with uncertainty, that pivot felt fitting. Williams was part of Texas’ first recruiting class under Mack Brown in 1998, and as a freshman he was so ready to leave that he wanted nothing more than to go home. While the rest of the team practiced, assistant coach Hardee McCrary stayed with him.
“Hardee McCrary actually sat there with me and said, ‘Hey, you know what, just don’t worry about practice,’ believe it or not,” Williams said.
He kept going after that, and as Williams put it, “the rest is history.”
That history included becoming a consensus First-Team All-American as a senior and going fourth overall in the 2002 NFL Draft to the Buffalo Bills. Injuries limited his pro career, but he still started 64 games over five seasons.
Even so, Williams sounded far more interested in the next generation than the plaque in front of him. He joked that his children never believed his stories anyway, then shifted into full dad mode when talking about Mia.
“Now my job is to help her fulfill her dreams,” Mike said. “A lot of my time is spent with her, just giving back to her and helping her fulfill her dreams.”
Mia got her turn to talk about her father, too, and kept it short.
“He’s a good football player,” she said.
Williams wasn’t exactly blown away by that scouting report.
“That sounds so disingenuous,” Mike said. “I’m just a good football player?”
Still, he didn’t press the issue. He went right back to praising his daughter.
“You’re phenomenal,” Mike said to Mia.
The weekend may have been designed to remind people of the athlete Mike Williams once was, but he seemed more focused on introducing everyone to the athlete Mia Williams is becoming.
“She’s not the chip off the old block; she just started a new one,” Mike said.
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