Tyleik Williams Putting In The Work For The Ultimate Goal

The last few seasons have not gone according to plan for the Ohio State football team. Three losses in a row to Michigan has been a bitter pill to swallow, and it has provided exactly the kind of motivation one would expect.

The desire to beat Michigan, win a Big Ten Championship, and play for a national championship were all integral in the respective decisions to return for a number of draft-eligible Buckeyes. One of those players was defensive tackle Tyleik Williams.

Williams had his best season as a Buckeye last year as a junior, posting 53 tackles and three sacks, while also tying for the team lead with 10.0 tackles for loss.

His decision to return was based on momentum and unfinished business, and he has used both as fuel over the offseason.

“The last few years have been disappointing at the end of the season, so I feel like we put more work in,” Williams said this spring. “I feel like that’s what we’re missing, we’re just putting more work in. And you’ve just got to do that throughout the summer, the spring, the fall, and then you’ve just got to show it on the field.”

The Buckeyes will be equipped very well to do just that. Williams and his teammates have been close. The loss to Michigan last year and the loss to Georgia in the playoffs the year before came in the game’s final moments. A tackle here or there could have changed everything. So the thought is that with more work, those things will happen the next time the situation arises.

It won’t change the past, but it could change the future.

“Of course it’s frustrating, but you can’t change the outcome,” Williams said of the late-season losses. “You can’t really dwell on it. You’ve just got to come back and work hard. Do things better than you did last year, and hopefully the outcome will change.”

Fifty Is The New Thirty-Five

Tyleik Williams certainly did his part last season, playing more snaps in a season than any Ohio State defensive tackle since All-American Dre’Mont Jones in 2018. Williams had eight games last season where played at least 50 snaps. That is the same number of 50-snap games for all Ohio State defensive tackles combined over the previous four seasons.

That’s another way to say that Williams played too much last season and if the Buckeyes want to win their end-of-season games, there needs to be more options up front. Williams will do whatever is needed, but he also knows the importance of building depth.

“I think I definitely can last,” he said. “We gotta get the young guys to come along with us. We can’t play 50 snaps a game. That’s just too much on our bodies. Just everybody, like O-line, D-line, we’ve got to get those younger guys to play and get depth pieces on the D-line and O-line and everywhere else so we can last that long run.”

Williams played more than he expected last year, which is a twist of irony considering he played much less than he expected the year before. It was almost as if defensive line coach Larry Johnson treated Williams like a father catching his young son smoking a cigarette — Johnson made Williams smoke the whole pack last year.

Williams took it all in stride.

“Of course I want to be in because I know I can contribute,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want to put that on anyone else when I know I can get the job done.”

Tackles Eligible

You don’t have to look far to see the impact that a pair of talented defensive tackles can have on a defense. Just look at the last three national championship defenses. Michigan’s duo of Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant were difficult for everybody to handle. The same can be said of the two years before that with Georgia.

Tyleik Williams knows that he and fellow starting defensive tackle Ty Hamilton can play a large part in how far this Ohio State team goes this season.

“Definitely,” he said. “I think if you look at the last couple of national championship winners, like the team up north, they’ve got two good D-tackles, two athletic D-tackles. You look at Georgia, two athletic D-tackles. So, I think there’s definitely a need if you want to go on a big run and beat those big teams.”

Williams sees himself as good as any of the defensive tackles he has seen recently at the NFL Combine. “I have tape too,” he remarked. And when he does finally head off to the NFL, he’ll have even more tape to show for it. But that will just be the byproduct of the actual goal, however.

“A national championship. A ring. Win all the games. We don’t want to lose anything. We’ve got a mindset that we can’t be beat and we just gotta go show it,” he said.

“So we gotta go big or go home, and we’re not trying to go home.”

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