Trades Ten Years Later - Mike Williams from Tampa to Buffalo
The NFL receiver born in 1987, not the NFL receiver born in 1984 or the NFL receiver born in 1994.
The Names: Buffalo Bills receive: Mike Williams. Tampa Bay Buccaneers receive: 2014 6th round pick (#185, Robert Herron).
The Context: One of the tricks of the trade when writing about trades from ten years ago is that a lot of these guys are still most-known for their trade from ten years ago. When you search “Eric Maynor” on Reddit, the second result is the post breaking news of the three-team trade that closed out our 2014 NBA Trade Deadline coverage. No player is more exciting than the moment they’re trading to your team; a pure source of entropy and upside that you’re suddenly rooting for. Trades may not be more interesting than “the sport” in a collective sense, but they’re typically more noteworthy than individual games in isolation. Sources on trades from ten years ago are more easily brought to the surface than you would expect.
This goes completely out the window when you’re trying to write about “Mike Williams.” The purple link below is the one we’re discussing today:
It’s tougher than usual to search for information on this guy instead of the active NFL receiver and tricky to tie information specifically to this Mike Williams and not one of the other three, but we’ll do our best. Mike Williams was born in Buffalo and attended Riverside Institute of Technology, a high school which has since closed. Williams was a high school star in both football and basketball and the 10th ranked football prospect in New York, but college scouts usually don’t brave the cold in Buffalo – he received offers from five schools and ultimately signed with Syracuse. Williams played in ten games as a true freshman and had 461 receiving yards, which somehow led the team.
In his 2007 sophomore season, Williams took his game to a different level, in more ways than one. He set a school record with 60 receptions (Syracuse is really not a football school, huh) and was one of the few bright spots on a team that otherwise went 2-10. He caught touchdowns in the final nine games of the season. When the football season ended, the former two-sport star regained that title by walking on to the Syracuse basketball team. He made his debut for the basketball Orange on December 15, 2007, where he had seven points in a blowout win over East Tennessee State. Walking on to a college basketball team as a football player is undoubtedly impressive; doing so at what is very clearly a “basketball school” is even more so. Sure, those seven points are the only seven Williams scored all season, a season in which the Orange uncharacteristically missed the NCAA tournament, but still!
Of course, it’s tricky to look into Mike Williams’ basketball career too much, since you get results for both former Syracuse star Michael Carter-Williams and the 2023 recruit Mike Williams that snubbed Syracuse for LSU. Fortunately it was short-lived.
The 2007-08 basketball season was likely the high-water mark for relations between Mike Williams and Syracuse University. In June 2008, Syracuse head coach Greg Robinson announced that Williams “[was] not enrolled at the university due to an academic issue,” which further reporting suggested was connected to two accusations of cheating, including on a spring final examination. The separation turned out to be a suspension and Williams returned to the Syracuse team (now coached by Doug Marrone) in January 2009. When Williams played the first game of his senior (or junior?) season that fall, he “had tears in his eyes” and “couldn’t believe [he] was back out here doing it again.” He caught another touchdown to extend his active touchdown streak to ten games.
The joyous reunion was short-lived. In October 2009, Mike Williams was suspended for a game against the Akron Zips for a “violation of team rules” that seemed to be related to academics. For his part, Williams posted a Facebook status that read “I HATE COLLEGE I CANT SEE ME DOING THIS FOR LONG.HINT HINT.-0 LMAO,” then followed that up with a calmer “Everyone, I am staying in school to get my degree Sorry for the false information out there.” It may not shock you to learn that the first Facebook status was the accurate one; two weeks later, Williams told Marrone that he was quitting the team. As it turns out, this was a bit of a preemptive strike, as Williams expected to be suspended by the team again after he was involved in a car accident returning from a casino at 5:30 in the morning.
We know that the NFL is willing to overlook what can euphemistically be tossed into the “character concerns” umbrella, both based on our recent posts and the fact that the writing of this one proves that Mike Williams had an NFL career. Williams’ offenses pale in comparison to the litany of star athletes whose crimes left clear victims. But if there’s one cardinal sin in the NFL, it’s quitting on your team. “On paper, he’s a late first-round pick based on his talent alone,” said Sean Keeley in his draft profile on Williams. But the actual prognostications were dimmer. “If Williams can prove to teams that he’s not a malcontent, he’s still got a shot at the 2nd round. If he doesn’t make anyone feel comfortable enough to risk it, he’s looking at 3rd or even 4th round.”
Mike Williams was selected by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 4th round of the 2010 NFL Draft. He set to work rehabilitating his image with the Bucs and things went about as well as possible at first. In his rookie year, Williams set a Buccaneers franchise record by catching eleven touchdown passes, earning accolades as the runner-up for 2010 Offensive Rookie of the Year behind Sam Bradford and being ranked by his peers at #83 on the 2011 NFL Top 100 list. Even though he never posted double-digit touchdowns again, he continued to catch upwards of 60 passes for the next two seasons even as the arrival of Vincent Jackson in 2012 theoretically relegated Williams to #2 receiver on the depth chart. Williams and Tampa Bay set to continue their mutually beneficial relationship when Williams signed a six-year, $40.25 million contract extension just ahead of the 2013 season.
Using an alternative timeline, Williams signed that extension 254 days before he was traded away for a 6th-round pick, so things obviously went south pretty quickly. It began with an 0-7 start to the season for Tampa Bay, with no victories before Williams was placed on season-ending injured reserve to get surgery for a torn hamstring. Whether football was distracting Williams from mischief or whether the demonstration of his football talents distracted others from commenting on Williams’ mischief is a fair question, but the mischief quite clearly rose to the surface following his injury. I’m not editorializing; Williams was literally charged with criminal mischief (and trespassing) stemming from a December incident where he “caused $200 worth of damage to a front door.”
By 2014, the reporting started to get cumulative and comical. A January report from Scott Reynolds suggested that the Buccaneers were concerned over Williams’ IR work ethic after he received over $200,000 in fines from missing meetings and rehab sessions. Reynolds also noted that from September to January, Williams made 135 Instagram posts, only three of which were football-related. In March, after Williams was involved in a strange incident where police showed up at his house when he was stabbed in the left thigh with a kitchen knife by his brother, Tom Jones of the Tampa Bay Times wrote a column calling for the Buccaneers to get rid of Williams. Jones cited some incredible off-field statistics on Williams, who had racked up 16 traffic citations since 2010, caused $50,000 in damage to his 5,400 square foot rented house, and received “at least five” 911 calls in a four-month stretch, with neighbors discussing parties where cars drove on lawns at 4 AM and mattresses ended up on the front lawn.
Making matters trickier, the poor 2013 season resulted in an organizational housecleaning and a new head coach and GM, neither of whom had any particular attachment to Mike Williams. That new head coach, Lovie Smith, said he didn’t “believe a guy should get a death sentence on one infraction” and suggested that “if a player shows a pattern of behavior that we feel like we don’t want displayed by our (team), then more drastic measures come into play.”
The Trade: A week and a half later, Lovie Smith must have realized there was a super apparent “pattern of behavior” from Mike Williams. Williams was traded to his hometown Buffalo Bills in exchange for a sixth-round pick. The trade didn’t result in much value for Tampa Bay, saving them only $1.8 million in salary cap space and creating a massive roster hole at the wide receiver position that would probably force them to take a receiver early in the 2014 NFL Draft. In an ironic twist, the trade reunited Williams with second-year Bills coach Doug Marrone, whose last interactions with Williams presumably came when he quit Marrone’s Syracuse football team in his senior year.
Fans viewed the move as a major win for the Bills given Williams’ immense talent potential and the low stakes involved. His off-field concerns were generally dismissed as “more hilarious than troubling,” which in fairness is pretty true from my perspective. They also observed the incredible quantity of “Williams” on the roster (Aaron, Chris, Duke (whose first name is, naturally, Michael), Kyle, Mario, and now Mike) and pointed out how fitting this was for the team nicknamed “the Bills.”
The Results: It went poorly. In his first five games with the Bills, Mike Williams only had eight catches for 142 yards. Then, uh, nothing else. On October 12, Williams was a healthy scratch in a game against New England, which led his agent to request permission to seek a trade. Bills’ general manager Kevin Whaley happily granted permission and threw in the subtle dagger of a quote “if he gets me compensation worthy of a No. 1 receiver, which he claimed he is, then we would entertain it.” Shockingly, no team wanted to offer that compensation and Williams remained with the Bills, playing in four more games (with 21 offensive snaps, one target, and no catches) before he was placed on injury waivers in December and ultimately cut by the team a couple of weeks later.
The Buccaneers ended up using the 6th-round pick from the trade to draft a receiver, Robert Herron. Herron only played in the 2014 season and had six catches for 58 yards and one touchdown – nothing stellar, but shockingly comparable to Williams’ output that year. But Williams’ departure also led the Buccaneers to make a more significant move in the draft, as their newly created hole at wide receiver induced the team to select Mike Evans with the 7th overall pick (not to be confused with Mike Evans or Mike Evans). In his rookie year, Evans caught 12 touchdowns to break Williams’ franchise record for most receiving touchdowns in a single season. Williams’ 2010 season has now fallen to sixth on the Buccaneers’ franchise record for receiving touchdowns in a season, with Evans taking all five of the top five spots. He is the best wide receiver in franchise history and it isn’t remotely close, with his 94 touchdowns and 11,680 receiving yards towering over the second-place marks of 34 touchdowns and 6,690 yards (both held by Chris Godwin).
The Aftermath: Williams never played an NFL game again after his release from the Bills. As a free agent, he was suspended by the NFL for six games of the 2015 season for undisclosed reasons. He signed with the Chiefs in 2016, but was cut before the season began.
It’s not clear how much of Williams’ announced $40 million contract was guaranteed, but evidently not enough to leave him set for life. After his football career, Williams returned to Florida and began working in construction. In August of 2023, he was doing electrical work on a job site when somebody dropped a steel beam from above that landed on his head. Williams walked off the site with a headache and visited a hospital, who believed he only had a concussion and let him go. But a few days later, he was admitted after losing feeling in his legs. Williams’ condition continued to worsen in the hospital amid reports that he had died; these reports were later refuted by his family, who indicated he was in a medically-induced coma and on life support. In early September, he was removed from life support and he passed away on September 12 at age 36.
The sudden and tragic circumstances of his death were exacerbated when the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner Department announced his cause of death as “Bacterial Sepsis with Cerebral Abscesses and Necrotizing Lobar Pneumonia due to multiple Dental Caries and retained tooth roots,” with cardiovascular disease also described as a contributing factor. It’s unclear (at least to me) if the steel beam incident exacerbated conditions caused by an oral health condition or if it’s an entirely unrelated coincidence, but either way I’m going to go use mouthwash right this second.
Miscellaneous: Mike Williams was also a Florida man who was killed as part of a love affair / insurance fraud scheme, whose investigation was botched when law enforcement concluded his body had been eaten by alligators despite his death occurring at a temperature when alligators do not hunt. Mike Williams was also a Special Deputy in Abilene, Kansas, who was killed in a friendly fire incident in 1871 by then-marshal “Wild Bill” Hickok and whose death marked Hickok’s retirement from gunfighting. Mike Williams is also a Welsh midfielder who played 9 games for Wrexham, not to be confused with the Welsh defender Mike Williams who played 238 games for Wrexham, not to be confused with the Welsh defender Mike Williams who played 117 games for Wrexham. There is an entirely separate disambiguation page for “Michael Williams” that includes four more football players and another Welsh soccer player who started his youth career at Wrexham.
April 7, 2024:
Minnesota Twins receive: Eduardo Nunez
New York Yankees receive: Miguel Sulbaran