Texas Tech football: The most underrated players of the Mike Leach era

LB Marlon Williams

Former LB Marlon Williams was another in a long line of undersized Texas Tech linebackers that played larger than their stature.  The 5-foot-10, 219-pound Pflugerville native was a speedy sideline-to-sideline tackler who ended his career with 231 career tackles.

In 2008, he garnered honorable mention All-Big 12 honors.  (Imagine that, a member of the 2008 team came up big.)  That season he registered 72 tackles, two sacks, and a fumble recovery.  He had a season-high 12 tackles at Texas A&M (yes kids, Texas Tech and Texas A&M used to play every year).  That was the most prolific game of his career and one of five double-digit tackle games he had for the Red Raiders.

A year later, he managed to best that tackle total by one while coming up with an extra 1.5 sacks and an interception.  He opened that year by racking up ten tackles in two of the first three games including at Texas.

In the 2008 game against the Longhorns, he had just two tackles but both went for loss and one was an important sack.  That was one of 5.5 sacks he had during his time on the South Plains.

Williams was a nice LB to have in the Big 12.  At a time when the entire conference was fully invested in imitating Leach’s “Air Raid”, speed was the most important element a LB could bring to the field and Williams had that in spades.

After his playing days, Williams became a bit of a reality TV star by appearing on MTV’s The Real World.  However, before he found out what life was like when people stopped being polite and started getting real, he was a three-year starter for the Texas Tech football team and an important component of the best teams Mike Leach ever had.