Detroit Lions wide receiver Jameson Williams is one of the fastest players in the NFL. He hit 20-plus miles per hour with the ball in his hands more than any other player in the league last season, according to NFL.com’s NextGenStats, and Williams has claimed he can run the 40-yard dash in 4.1 seconds (He didn’t run the 40 the year he entered the draft because he was coming off a torn ACL.) His career, though, has had a slow ramp up.
Williams missed almost the entirety of his rookie year recovering from a torn ACL suffered at the end of his final collegiate season. He ended up playing just 78 offensive snaps across six games, catching one pass for 41 yards and a touchdown and rushing once for 40 yards. In Year 2, he was suspended for the first four games of the season after violating the league’s gambling policy, and it took him until the team’s final playoff game to finally crack the 70% snap rate mark.
He got off to a hot start in 2024, catching 17 passes for 361 yards and three scores in the Lions’ first six games, but then he took a two-game suspension for violating the league’s performance-enhancing drug policy. He came back strong after the suspension, though, and ended the year with an electric 58 receptions for 1,001 yards and seven touchdowns, plus 11 rushes for 61 yards and an additional score. He became one of just 16 players ever to reach at least 1,000 yards while seeing fewer than 100 targets.
If Lions head coach Dan Campbell is to be believed, even bigger things are in store for Williams in 2025.
The biggest improvement Campbell has noticed for Williams? “He’s gotten so much stronger,” Campbell said, via ESPN. Campbell also said that the “sky’s the limit” for Williams and that the Lions “expect him to have a huge season.”
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Williams is already one of the most explosive players in the NFL. He finished the season with 16 receptions of at least 20 yards. Only 12 players in the league had more. And again, Williams only had 58 receptions total, and he was targeted just 91 times. He was primarily used as an intermediate and deep target, befitting his speed. His success on the intermediate in-breaking routes that make up such an important part of Detroit’s offense was spectacular, and a primary source of those explosive plays.
If he can use the additional strength to be even more of a threat in the shorter areas of the field that right now are dominated by Amon-Ra St. Brown, Sam LaPorta and Jahmyr Gibbs, Williams can become an even more dynamic threat, and the Lions’ offense will be even more difficult to stop.
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