‘Plan to have many more’ games like Sunday

‘Plan to have many more’ games like Sunday

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Jameson Williams held on tight and didn’t let go.

“I’ve never had a game ball,” Williams said Sunday, holding a ball with a white panel in his right hand. “Not in ‘Bama, not anywhere. I’m not even going to lie, this right here, this might not leave my hands. I might go to sleep with it.”

If Williams grabbed the ball he was given when he helped the Detroit Lions open their season with a 26-20 overtime win over the Los Angeles Rams at Ford Field on Sunday, no one can blame him.

Williams caught five passes for 121 yards and scored a 52-yard touchdown in the breakthrough performance he and others had been waiting for most of his career.

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Williams, a 2022 first-round pick, missed most of his rookie season rehabbing a knee injury in college and was suspended for the first four games of last season. He entered this year with 25 career catches for 395 yards and never had more than 69 yards in a game, though Lions players and coaches insisted throughout the offseason and training camp that Williams was ready for a big year.

“Listen, I expected him to play pretty well, to play better, and he showed up,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said. “I mean, that was a big game to be able to catch a couple and get through it. And the best part about it was he didn’t even play his best ball. There’s still so much to clean up, but it also shows how much work he’s put in, and he’s improving, and he’s an improved player, and he wants it, and he keeps working at it.”

Williams gave the sluggish Lions offense a boost on Sunday by catching a pass for 36 yards on the team’s third offensive play, helping the Lions take an early 10-3 lead.

He ran 13 yards on an end-around on the same drive to set up Jahmyr Gibbs’ 1-yard touchdown run, then burned Rams cornerback Tre’Davious White on a double move early in the third quarter for the long touchdown that put the Lions ahead 17-3.

Williams faked a hitch route and passed White, who grabbed Williams in a futile attempt to intercept the pass and disrupt the play.

“It was a play that we had, we knew who we were going to run it on and we had it in motion early in the week,” Williams said. “We worked on it a couple of times and we called it in the game. We said whoever gets the pass — it’s a mirror pass, so it’s both sides, so whoever wins gets the ball.”

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Matthew Stafford, playing behind a short-handed offensive line that lost its top receiver Puka Nacua early in the game to a knee injury, completed 34 of 49 passes for 317 yards as the Rams scored 17 straight points and took a 20-17 lead with 4:30 to play.

The Lions followed this up with a nine-play, 55-yard field goal drive to send the game into overtime. They then won on the only possession of the extra period when David Montgomery scored on a 1-yard run.

Montgomery ran for 45 of his game-high 91 yards on five carries on the possession, and said he felt unstoppable on the final drive. The Lions finished with 163 yards rushing total against the team they beat in last year’s wild-card round of the playoffs.

“We didn’t play our best game, and we still won,” Lions quarterback Jared Goff said. “There’s a lot of cleaning up to do, a lot of things to get better at. It kind of feels like Week 1 last year, where it was like, ‘Yeah, we made a couple mistakes, but we still managed to win.’ And for it to go into overtime is special — and I think we’ll look back on it in a couple months and be glad we did it.”

Williams said he hopes Sunday’s match is the start of something special for him too.

The Rams played most of the game with Amon-Ra St. Brown (three catches, 13 yards), allowing Williams to play a key role in Detroit’s passing game.

Williams was the only other wide receiver Goff directed a pass to on Sunday. He was responsible for three of the Lions’ top four offensive plays, with gains of 52, 36 and 27 yards.

“This is just Game 1,” Williams said. “Like I said, I put a lot of work into it. I expected to have a big game. I personally expect to have a big game, I guess, it’s just big for the world because it’s my first one. But I plan on playing a lot more. I don’t expect this to be the best game of my career. I expect this to just be a start of being myself.”

Dave Birkett is the author of the new book “Detroit Lions: An Illustrated Timeline.” Pre-order now from Reedy Press.

Contact him via [email protected]Follow him on X and Instagram via @davebirkett.