Mike Williams' Dropsies Should Drop Him From Next Year's Roster

The young, tall receiver grabbed football after football in practice, the pigskin sticking to his gloved fingers with the desired tackiness. It had been going that way for a few weeks, and the rookie declared his days of dropping balls would soon be over with.

"The difference is unbelievable," Herman Moore, the rookie from Virginia, told the interloping reporters after one practice during that 1991 season. Moore, you see, had switched to different contact lenses, and the dropsies he had experienced earlier in the season were vanishing as a result. The news was snickered at by some of the veteran interlopers, who'd covered the team for years and had now, thanks to Moore, discovered a new excuse for Lions ineptitude.

Ahh, but it wasn't merely an excuse to explain away the rookie's pass-catching difficulties. For after Moore switched to the new eyewear, he slowly but surely developed, year after year, until one day he became the most prolific wide receiver in franchise history -- catching over 120 balls in 1995. Some would say he is still the best grabber of footballs the team has ever employed.

Mike Williams has dropsies. He has other issues, too, apparently, but those are tucked away, out of sight, at least from the dutiful interlopers. All we can see is what occurs on the football field, and now that he is finally getting a chance to prove himself as a serviceable receiver, he goes and drops five footballs, including the potential game-winner, in Sunday's 26-21 loss to the Chicago Bears.



"I better not say too much about it, or else next year they'll have the Mike Williams March," the second-year player from USC said afterward, with gallows humor, about a fan base who marched in protest against team president Matt Millen last season.

But the joke might be on Williams himself.

Herman Moore's problems were corrected with eyewear. He proved, once he could see the ball properly, that he had marvelous hands. Rarely, it seemed, was a ball ever thrown his way that was right in his bread basket. Usually Moore had to stretch, twist, reach, and lunge with his six-foot-four frame to snare the passes thrown by the wayward Lions QB of the Day. But he caught them -- more often than not.

Williams, as far as I know, has decent eyesight. It's one of the few things, in fact, that hasn't been bantied about as being wrong with him. It hasn't joined his conditioning, his weight, his work ethic, and his lack of interest as suspects in the torpedoing of his short NFL career.

No, Williams has dropsies because he isn't, frankly, all that good of a receiver. Maybe he will never be. Maybe.

It's my opinion, as one of those occasional ink-stained interlopers, that the Lions should munch on yet another contract and part ways with Mike Williams, sometime before the next NFL Draft. You know -- the old change of scenery trick. Charlie Rogers had his scenery changed, too -- but the scenery, in his case, changed from practice fields and lockerrooms to the unemployment line. His phone still isn't ringing, and he was released over four months ago.

Williams had a chance to finally prove all his coaches, critics, and naysayers wrong on Sunday afternoon against the Bears. No more excuses about how you can't catch balls standing on the sidelines, helmet in hand. Lions QB Jon Kitna went to Williams frequently -- more frequently than any other game this season -- and all he got for his troubles was watching his receiver engage in dropsies.

The funny thing is, Williams could have washed away just about all of those dropsies if he had just been able to come down with Kitna's prayerful heave as the gun went off Sunday. The pass, thrown toward the back of the end zone, was shockingly catchable, considering that most of those situations call for the Hail Mary -- another prayerful throw that even has its own spiritual name.

Yet Williams found himself relatively open, and replays showed that he got every bit of both of his hands -- his gloved hands -- on the ball before it slammed onto the field turf, somehow extricated from his grasp. But it also looked like Williams did his own extricating, with little help from the Bears defender. Dropsies.

The Lions' problems, of course, go way beyond the slippery fingers of yet another first-round draft bust. Rather, Mike Williams' nightmarish game merely served as a metaphor for another lousy season in the history of a lousy football team. Still, he's part of the problem, and since that problem should be imploded and begun anew from the resulting rubble, I see no good reason to keep him on next season's Lions roster.

You can always find guys who come down with the dropsies in the later draft rounds, I hear.