Jamaal Williams at BYU: Records, Redemption, and the Making of an NFL Back
September 30, 2016. Provo, Utah. Jamaal Williams took a handoff from Taysom Hill on a first-and-ten early in the second quarter and turned it into 62 yards. By the time he scored his fifth touchdown of the night – a record-tying performance in a 55-53 overtime win over Toledo – he had run for 286 yards, breaking a BYU single-game record that had stood since 1962. Eldon Fortie’s 272-yard game against George Washington had survived 54 years. Williams erased it in one night. He told reporters afterward that the record was “for the whole team.” He was twenty-one years old and had missed an entire season just twelve months earlier.
A Three-Star Recruit Who Had One Offer Worth Keeping
Williams grew up in Fontana and Rialto, California, playing high school ball at Summit High School in Fontana for the Sky Hawks. He wasn’t a recruiting priority. Three stars. The kind of prospect who gets one or two offers and has to make a real decision rather than a performative one. Boise State offered. So did BYU. He picked BYU – not because of the facilities or the coaching staff’s sales pitch, but because the Cougars called first. “Loyalty is a big deal for me,” he said years later, after the draft. That single sentence explains a lot about what followed at BYU, including the part that almost ended his career there.
He enrolled in 2012 at seventeen. Didn’t know much about BYU’s culture, the Honor Code, or what he was walking into. What he did know was that someone had believed in him before anyone else did, and he wasn’t going to forget it.
Freshman Year Was No Warning – It Was a Preview
Williams made his collegiate debut on August 30, 2012, against Washington State. Fifteen rushing yards. Fine for a seventeen-year-old freshman, not remarkable. Six weeks later, against Hawaii, he put up 155 rushing yards and two touchdowns. Against Oregon State a few weeks after that, two more scores. He finished his true freshman season with 775 yards on 166 carries and 12 touchdowns – the most carries, yards, and touchdowns ever recorded by a BYU true freshman. College Sports Madness named him Independent Freshman of the Year. He also made the All-Independent First Team.
That’s a strange thing about the Williams story: almost nothing about his BYU career was quiet or gradual. He didn’t ease into becoming the school’s best rusher. He showed up, immediately did things no BYU freshman had done, and kept accelerating from there – with one significant interruption that looked, briefly, like it might define him differently.
2013: The Year He Actually Became a Problem for Defenses
The 2013 season opener was against Virginia. Williams ran for 144 yards and added 25 receiving. Next game, against Texas – 182 yards. He broke 100 yards six more times that year, including 219 yards against Nevada in November. He finished with 1,233 rushing yards, seven rushing touchdowns, and 18 receptions for 125 yards. Fourth BYU player ever to have multiple 1,000-yard rushing seasons at the school, and he was a sophomore doing it.
The 2014 season started just as well – 89 yards against Texas in the opener, 139 yards and two scores against Houston the following week – before a knee injury in October ended it at 518 yards and four touchdowns in six games. He wouldn’t play again that year.
The Year He Didn’t Play – and Why He Came Back Anyway
Before the 2015 season, Williams was dismissed from BYU for an Honor Code violation. He’s been straightforward about what it was: he had a girl in his room. At a school with BYU’s specific code of conduct, that was enough to cost him his spot on the roster. He could have transferred. Schools would have taken him – he’d already shown he could rush for over 1,200 yards against real competition. He didn’t transfer. He redshirted, waited, and came back for 2016.
“I came back mostly for my team,” he said afterward. “I wanted to show my teammates that I am down for them, that I’m loyal to them and that I know they will always have my back.” There’s something worth sitting with there – not as inspiration but as plain fact. He chose to lose a year of eligibility and return to a program that had suspended him, rather than take the easier path somewhere else. Whether BYU shaped that loyalty or simply confirmed it, it held.
2016: The Season That Rewrote the BYU Record Books
He came back bigger – physically, visibly heavier through the legs – and ran like someone settling a debt. The first game of 2016, against Arizona: 163 yards. Against West Virginia the following month: 169 yards and two touchdowns. Then came Toledo.
The 286-yard, five-touchdown night against Toledo on September 30 broke Eldon Fortie’s 54-year-old single-game record. But it was part of a stretch that had no precedent in BYU history. In three consecutive games – West Virginia, Toledo, Michigan State – Williams ran for 618 yards on 84 carries at 7.4 yards per carry with nine touchdowns. No BYU running back had ever rushed for more than 400 yards in a two-game stretch. He did it, and then extended it to 600 over three. He was also second in the nation in rushing yards during that run, and second in rushing attempts – 139 total through six games, itself a BYU record by ten carries over Luke Staley’s 2001 pace.
The all-time career record fell on October 14 against Mississippi State. Harvey Unga had held the BYU record with 3,455 career rushing yards. Williams passed it on a 9-yard run in overtime. Unga, working that season as a graduate assistant with the offensive line, had been watching for it. Williams finished his career with 3,901 yards – 446 yards clear of the record he broke.
The Toledo Game, Specifically
The final score – 55-53 in overtime – doesn’t fully communicate how strange that game was. Toledo had Kareem Hunt in their backfield. BYU led, trailed, led again, trailed again. With 26 seconds left, Taysom Hill faked a shovel pass and picked up a first down out of bounds. Two seconds on the clock, Rhett Almond hit the field goal from 19 yards. Williams had 286 yards and five touchdowns before the kick even went up.
Head coach Kalani Sitake’s assessment afterward was direct: “Jamaal got us here.” He wasn’t wrong. Williams carried the ball 29 times. BYU averaged 9.9 yards per rush for the game. The previous single-game record had been set when Dwight Eisenhower was still president.
What He Left Behind at BYU – the Full Record Sheet
Career rushing yards: 3,901 – first in BYU history. Career rushing attempts: 726 – first. Career 100-yard games: 16 – first. Single-game rushing yards: 286 – first, and still standing. His 35 career rushing touchdowns are also among the top marks in school history, with only two fumbles lost in college across his entire BYU career. That fumble number matters later.
For context on where he sits among BYU’s all-time backs: Harvey Unga (3,455 yards), Luke Staley (2,552 yards, Doak Walker Award winner in 2001), Harvey Langi, and Pete Van Valkenburg all had outstanding careers. Williams passed every one of them, and he did it while missing an entire season and cutting another short to injury. His 2016 Poinsettia Bowl MVP performance – 210 yards and a touchdown against Wyoming – was his final game as a Cougar.
BYU Didn’t Just Build His Stats – It Built His Habit of Not Fumbling
This is the detail that connects his BYU years to the NFL in the most concrete way possible. Williams finished his college career with two fumbles lost across hundreds of carries. In the NFL, that ball security translated directly. On November 25, 2021, playing for the Detroit Lions, Williams carried the ball for the 585th time in his NFL career without a fumble – breaking the league record previously held by Phillip Lindsay. NFL teams draft ball carriers partly on fumble rate. Williams’ rate was essentially zero, and that wasn’t luck. He fumbled twice in five years of college football.
The Draft, the Loyalty, and What Came Next
NFL draft expert Mel Kiper Jr. compared Williams pre-draft to Jordan Howard – “real tough inside runner, downhill, breaks tackles” – which turned out to be reasonably accurate as a stylistic description. Williams ran a 4.53 forty at BYU’s pro day and posted a 33-inch vertical. The Green Bay Packers selected him in the fourth round, 134th overall, on April 29, 2017. He was the thirteenth running back taken that year.
His first call after being drafted was about staying loyal to the Packers the same way he’d stayed loyal to the Cougars. “I stayed at BYU because they were the first team to give me an offer. Loyalty is a big deal for me, and I’m just grateful to the Packers. I’ll be loyal to them, too.” Kalani Sitake’s public statement at the time called Williams “a tough, decisive runner and good pass protector” who could “do it all.” That wasn’t just coaching praise. Williams played four seasons in Green Bay, then two in Detroit where he rushed for 601 yards and three touchdowns in 2021 while breaking the fumble record, then two more in New Orleans before the Saints released him in March 2025.
His NFL career totals: 117 games, 1,069 carries, 4,122 rushing yards, 32 touchdowns. He did it as a backup and primary back, in multiple offensive systems, at 224 pounds. The track record for BYU running backs in the NFL before Williams was genuinely poor – Bill Ring led all former Cougar backs with 732 career rushing yards, and he went undrafted. Williams didn’t just outperform that history. He made it look like a different sport.
What He Said About BYU, Years Later
At BYU Media Day in June 2018 – Williams showing up in a Louis Vuitton fanny pack, fresh off his rookie year with the Packers – he talked about the fans who still came out to Lambeau Field to see him. “About every two weeks, there’s a BYU fan outside the gate. I make sure I take a picture with them.” He also said something that landed differently than a standard gratitude quote: “Had I not attended BYU, I’d probably be a wild man.” That’s not a recruitment line. That’s a person describing how a specific place changed something specific about him. Whether you take it at face value or read it as the kind of thing you say at a school’s media day, it points toward something real – his five years in Provo, the suspension included, produced a player and a person the NFL was willing to draft and, more importantly, trust with the ball 1,069 times.
Comments