Sports reporters covering Alabama football must feel like they have returned to the classroom when interviewing Crimson Tide junior offensive tackle Jonah Williams. Now in his third year as a starter and considered the best offensive lineman in college football – some have said he may be the best player in college football – Williams brings a different perspective to his Saturday job.

A rule of thumb for some reporters is to keep it simple when interviewing offensive linemen because they seem to have the worst view of a football game – that view being primarily the facemask of the defensive linemen a few inches from their own facemask.

That is not the case for interviews with Jonah Williams, a 6-5, 300-pounder with the off-the-field demeanor of a student as much as a student-athlete.

As Williams reviewed the performance of the Bama offensive line in the season-opening 51-14 win over Louisville in Orlando, he gave credit to the Cardinals’s defense and defensive coordinator.

“They’re kind of known for running kind of exotic blitzes,” Williams for-instanced. “There’s one blitz they have 41 ways to run. So some things, I think, especially if you’re inexperienced, are going be tough to pick up.”

Wait.

How do you run the same blitz 41 different ways?

Jonah Williams thinks about his football job

“Different fronts, different coverages, secondary shells, that type of things,” Williams said. “It’s little nuances. You don’t go out there and think, ‘Which of the 41?’ We have rules that pick things up.”

He also explained that Alabama prepared for Louisville by studying film from Notre Dame when Cardinals Defensive Coordinator Brian VanGorder was with the Irish.

Williams’s offensive line teammate Ross Pierschbacher, no slouch as a student in the student-athlete nomenclature, describes Williams as “a student of the game who loves the game of football. From the second he came in, he’s always been into watching extra film. His knowledge of defensive schemes are way above anyone else in the room.”

Williams didn’t shy away from the proposition that he could be a defensive coordinator.

“If I knew the verbiage for it, probably,” he said. “I think that a lot of times it’s almost a recognition thing.”

Earlier Williams had described the notebooks that he keeps.

“I’m a very visual guy,” he said. “My notebook is all drawings and diagrams, stuff like that. I don’t have a lot of bullet points.”

In games, he said, that visual recognition comes into play.

“I think that kind of an alarm goes off if something’s not right,” he said.

He explained quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s 9-yard run for a touchdown behind the left side of the offensive line against Louisville on a called play.

“I noticed that the [defensive] end is usually outside of the tight end, and he was head up on the tight end and the (line)backer was a little plused over. So we made a call where we can exchange those blocking [assignments] knowing the D-end is going inside and the linebacker is scraping over the top. I made the call to (tight end Irv Smith, Jr.) and he went up and covered the guy up.

“It’s just that type of thing where I probably couldn’t tell you what they would call that, but I could recognize something was not right about the alignment of the defense.

“I guess it’s just that alarm that says, ‘Hey, something’s not right.’ That’s how I look at it.”

Smith said, “Jonah is a three-year starter now. He has a lot of experience and he studies a lot, so he knows what’s going on. He knows when they do a certain adjustment that we need to execute that. Being aside of him is awesome.

“I’m confident in what he says. If he says it, we’re going to go with it.”

Williams shared another example of his craft in a discussion of Tagovailoa’s escapability.

“That’s part of what makes him such a good player, that ability to extend plays,” Williams said. “And as a lineman, we kind of have this thing called a mental clock where you’re thinking, ‘Well the ball should be out,’ and you really have to erase that. You can’t stop blocking at any point. A lot of the times, as a tackle, I’m blocking my guy, I try to set the depth of the pocket and at some point usually they’ll try to spin back inside so they don’t get ran up field by the quarterback and open up that B-gap for him to run out of.

“A lot of times I’m blocking him and I see the defender go somewhere that he shouldn’t go if he’s set up (in the pocket), so I know he’s doing something, creating an opening or making someone miss, something like that. It’s exciting as an offensive lineman, I’m never going to complain about a quarterback making plays, even if I have to block for 45 seconds.”

For those who get just a glimpse of Alabama football practices, the assumption is that Offensive Line Coach Brent Key is all about the holler, an intense instructor and motivator.

During a game, though, Williams said, his coach “is a lot more calm and cerebral.

“In practice he’s keeping the tempo high, he’s keeping us moving fast.

“But in the game, we go over there on the bench and we sit down and he’ll go over all the plays that we just ran in that series. And he’ll go through each one, and he’ll ask the center what front did we see and if we saw some sort of blitz or pressure from the left. He’ll say Jonah or Lester, ‘what are you guys seeing over here?’ And we’ll draw it up and talk through it. He’ll be talking to guys upstairs and other people watching it. So, I think that we really try to be cerebral about it and make corrections as we go. It’s not just about fiery energy so much.”