

SANTA CLARA

Joe Williams is the different one. Thursday, the newest 49ers reported to team headquarters for rookie camp. Most wore shorts or jeans and tee shirts.

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The Deets: NBA chaos plays right into the Warriors’ hands Williams showed up in a sharp dark two-piece suit, white dress shirt and red tie. He said it definitely was about making a statement, to show respect for “the organization that put me in this position.”

The different position, he meant. It is a position that will be watched under a microscope over the next nine months, with cause, as Williams seems almost eager to confront. The different one even uses the word himself.

“My situation was different than 95 percent than of the players in this year draft,” Williams said.

When the 49ers picked him in the fourth round of the NFL draft last week, they were different, too. Other teams raised eyebrows. It wasn’t because Williams lacks talent. In the 2016, he was the Pac 12’s most dynamic running back. But early in the season, he dropped out of football and left the team for a month. Williams returned to the Utes for the final six regular season games and a Foster Farms Bowl victory over Indiana. He was a stunning sight to witness at times, gaining 332 yards against UCLA. But what team would draft a player that once quit his team?

The 49ers would. In scouting and researching Williams, they heard his explanation of what happened. He basically said he was dealing with a mental illness problem, wrestling with guilt from the 2006 death of his 7-year-old sister, Kylee, from an undiagnosed heart condition. Williams, who was then 15 years old, saw Kylee fall out of bed the night she died and had somehow always blamed himself for not saving her life. The ongoing struggle to deal with this led to his temporary abandonment of football.

The explanation convinced the 49ers, who this week get their first full examination of Williams in action. Before all that, however, Williams wanted to meet with the media and hammer home his theme of not being a quitter.

“I just plan to go out every day and just go to work,” Williams said. “I think me speaking in front of the cameras also helps people hear it from my mouth through the media. And then going on the field, just learning the playbook and contributing to the team this season.”

In his 15 minutes with reporters, Williams definitely did not duck any questions. He had his story down pat. But those of us who have been around the NFL block have seen players with stories who still take left turns and go sideways. Other players stay on track. Williams still has much to prove, even if he deserves empathy.

He has definitely packed a lot of drama into his young football life. After being raised in Pennsylvania and starring in high school, Williams spent a post-prep semester at Fork Union Military Academy to get his priorities and academics. Then he began his college career at the University of Connecticut, but Williams’ time there was cut short when he was implicated in a silly crime. Authorities said Williams pilfered a teammate’s credit card and ordered a high-end $1,400 backpack. Williams’ version of events is that his roommate sold him a backpack at a discount price–after the roommate used another teammate’s credit card to buy the backpack and had it shipped to Williams’ address.

“Being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Williams said. “The biggest thing was not asking enough questions. When you’re 18, you think you know everything . . . I wasn’t open to the opportunity of knowing, ‘This doesn’t seem right.’ ”

Whichever version you believe, Williams wound up paying a $200 fine and being dismissed from the UConn roster. He spent a season at a community college in Brooklyn not far from his grandparents’ place in the Bronx.

“I had hit rock bottom,” he said. “So it was just picking myself up and realizing that to get back to where I wanted to be, that would give me the best opportunity.”

He gained 1,000 yards in Brooklyn and then transferred to Utah. If you’re keeping track, the Utes were his fourth team since leaving high school. But he rose to the top in Salt Lake City, earning his time as a feature back while earning a sociology degree — which he says helped him realize why he was struggling so much mentally and taking what he now believes was too much medication to deal with his demons — Adderall, Vicodin and Percocet.

“And Nyquil to go to sleep,” he said. “I wanted to be sure that I wanted to be perfect in that respect . . . I had the mindset to exercise my degree. I knew I was going to be more of a detriment to the team if I didn’t step back and get my life together.”

In the month he was away from the team, Williams didn’t even work out to stay in shape. But he and his wife, Jasmine, still attended Utah home games to support his teammates.

“I was at the Arizona game with her, in the stands, watching it and two of our running backs went down,” Williams said. “We were down to our walk-on freshman. She looked at me first. And I was just, ‘Oh, man.’ It was like the big man upstairs saying, ‘I put you on this path to see where you would go but now I want you to continue going on this other way.”

The next day, Williams received phone calls from Utah staff members–including former 49ers head coach Dennis Erickson, who was the Utes’ running backs coach–to ask if he would think about coming back. He said he was willing. His teammates decided to welcome him back. The rest, you know.

Williams said the whole experience now gives him more impetus to make it in the NFL and prove skeptics wrong, to show he was the steal of the draft as a fourth rounder. Talent isn’t the issue. (“His ability to run the ball is as good as anybody’s,” said new 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan.) It’s the other stuff.

“Mental health is a very frowned-upon thing,” Williams said. “People hear ‘crazy’ and they want to close that door. So just for me to fix that in my head and understand that football is such a key to me besides my family and my sister . . . when I came back, that was the chip on my shoulder. The guilt was gone, so that added to more of the motivation. The scrutiny I was getting from some of the fans was just like . . . built-up aggression that I was letting out every week.”

Is he tough enough to keep bringing that aggression and when the going gets rugged mentally, keep showing up with a full tank in all respects every day? He says yes. He has learned coping skills. His toughest day in football, Williams said, was the day he decided it was necessary to leave the Utah team. This is far easier.

The 49ers hope so. They assigned Shanahan’s running backs coach, Bobby Turner, to interview and assess Williams’ situation over the past few months. Williams said Turner practically became his surrogate uncle. The end verdict was positive, or else general manager John Lynch would not have made the choice he did.

“I think it’s a wonderful story,” Lynch said last week.

A happy ending to that story would be nice. But the truth is, the 49ers have taken a big swing here with the different one. And they won’t know until December–if and when Williams completes the season successfully–whether the swing was too different.