Pro day was a quiet one for the former Alabama player with the brightest spotlight entering the NFL draft.

Potential top-3 pick Quinnen Williams was suited up but spent most of the time watching and cutting up with teammates. He did enough at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis to keep his stock in that top one percent. There was also the matter of the injured right pinky finger he had protected by a splint.

Williams said he had a procedure after the NFL Combine to correct a previously undisclosed injury suffered in the Auburn game. The defensive tackle said he broke the finger in the win over the Tigers. He explained the cringeworthy physics of how it was fractured.

“It got caught inside of a helmet,” Williams said, “and once I tried to make a move, it went a different way.”

Yeah …

“And I just played with it throughout the season with it and it messed up some ligaments inside it,” Williams said. “There were a lot of things going on while training that messed up things that I can do with my hands and stuff.”

Williams had eight tackles -- two behind the line -- a week after the injury against Georgia in the SEC Championship game. He went on to be named the unanimous All-American and was named national defensive player of the year.

After doing most of the physical drills in Indianapolis, it was just a better idea to sit out Tuesday in Tuscaloosa.

“There’s just different stuff going on with my finger that I didn’t want to reinjure or mess with,” Williams said. “So I really stood on my Combine performance and I feel like I did a great job at the combine to show the coaches and show the scouts and show the world that what I did on film calibrates into the person I am, not just a one breakout season player.”

The Combine performance was one for the record books. He stunned the viewers and nixed the advice of his agent when running a second 40-yard dash after clocking a 4.87 in his first attempt. He went 4.83 in Round 2. That’s the fourth-fastest time by a player 300-plus pounds at the Combine since 2003, according to NFL.com.

“It was crazy but I had way better numbers in training,” Williams said Tuesday, “so I wasn’t really satisfied with the number I hit.”

His times were closer to 4.78 or 4.79 in training, he said.

Michael Casagrande is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.