Williams a disruptive, dominant force in Panthers’ win

CEDAR FALLS - Like Northern Iowa's star running back, the Panthers' star pass rusher didn't quite get to show what he was really made of in the first two games this season.

The biggest part of that was who they were playing - Iowa's offensive line prowess historically speaks for itself, and Hawaii had solid team speed - and how coaches wanted to use nose tackle Xavier Williams.

But the UNI coaches let Williams do his thing in Saturday's 46-7 win against Northern Colorado.

'The big thing (Coach Mark) Farley and (defensive line coach Bryce) Paup have been talking to me about the last couple weeks is kind of just going through people,” Williams said. 'Farley, those were pretty much his exact words. He's like, ‘Hey, you just need to start going through people.' He just kept saying it over and over and got Paup on board with it. He's like, ‘If you want your sacks, you've just got to start going through people.'”

And get through people he did, to the tune of two sacks and 2.5 tackles for loss.

It was a change from how the Panthers (1-2) played schematically on defense after the first two weeks. Farley said the change was needed upon review of film to get the most out of Williams.

'In the first game, we asked X (Xavier) to do something a little different than what X is really good at because of who we played and how I thought we could beat them versus just let X go. X is a dominant force if you let him go vertical, and so we wanted to get more out of X because he is a great player,” Farley said. 'We went back and evaluated everything we were doing with him because it's early in the season. It's great to play two very competitive, very good football teams because you learn so much about your team, and that was one of the things we learned about it very early was what's X really good at and that he's gotta be a wild player for us. He was a wild player tonight.”

Williams said the defense learned a lot about itself as a whole in those first two games, not just limited to his role and performance.

Getting roughed up and making mistakes put the unit under the looking glass a little bit, and Williams said the unit was happy to see things that were very fixable.

The mental errors that plagued them - against Iowa, especially - didn't show up en masse and allowed the defense to establish the tone.

'We feel like the last couple games we've played well but kind of let it slip away from us. The big thing Farley preached on was we felt like, scheme wise and playing wise, we were good enough to execute and hold both those teams to lower points, but eventually we had a lot of mental mistakes,” Williams said. 'It was good to see what happens when we truly lock in and everybody's doing their assignment, doing their job and what the defense is actually capable of.”

Now that he's been able to get back to what made him a star, and the defense came together as a whole, Williams said the standard has been set for the UNI defense.

They held Northern Colorado to 199 total yards - just 52 total yards rushing - and gave up just the seven points, which came with backups in the game.

'When you hold a team, any team, to a low score or no score, it just makes you understand what your potential is. And now we set a quota,” Williams said. 'Now that's what we're aiming for. Now we know what we're capable of, so now we know what we should be able to do. And now there's no longer an excuse for it.”

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