By Don Williams | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

Matt Williams never gave up on his hope of being a college kicker, not even when he quit the team at Tarleton State about a month after he joined the Texans. What Williams intended to do was take a crack at making the Texas Tech team in 2009.

As it is, come Saturday, he’ll be the least likely guy to check in to a plush Dallas hotel as part of the Red Raiders’ Cotton Bowl contingent. No matter what happens from here on, Williams’ obituary figures to include the first-sentence, parenthetical identifier of kicker who came out of the stands and became a national sensation.

“I wanted to try to walk on in the spring,” he said this week. “I thought it would be cool. The whole Lynnwood thing spurred everything on a little bit quicker than I thought it would ever happen.”

Three months ago, with his name drawn at random, Williams stepped from the game-night crowd at Jones AT&T Stadium and made a now-famous field goal as part of a promotion for Lynnwood Townhomes. Two months ago, after his eligibility was established, he converted all nine extra points in his first game.

That was all it took.

Overnight, his life changed.

“It was tough on schoolwork,” he said, “because I used to be able to go home and chill after school. I’d be done at 1 o’clock every day. I could just go home and play Xbox if I wanted to. But now, I’ve got to go to practice. Then I’ve got to schedule time to do my homework and that kind of stuff.”

At the start of the semester, he was just a regular student from Weatherford. By mid-term, Katie Couric, Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres knew his name – and wanted to visit with him.

If they did, imagine what it was like on campus.

“It’s really kind of hard, because some people want to talk to you, and you’ve got to go through your regular-day routine,” Williams said.

The pluses, he quickly added, easily outweighed the minuses. Like prominent teammates such as running back Baron Batch and linebacker Brian Duncan, Williams sees his football success as an opportunity for a spiritual platform.

“It’s been good,” he said. “It’s been nice to meet new people, to help people. This has been a great way for me to outreach to people. I’ve got people to go to church with me and stuff like that. So that’s been really great from all this. It’s been a good opportunity for me, to use this for God.”

Since he immediately joined the team, Williams wasn’t allowed by NCAA rule to accept the six months free rent that he won from Lynnwood Townhomes for making the kick. There was nothing that said he couldn’t keep the nickname, though. Teammates are unlikely to soon call him anything other than “Lynnwood.”

After Williams made all his extra points in his Oct. 25 debut at Kansas, it was evident from post-game interviews that teammates didn’t know his real name.

That’s when the media frenzy picked up steam.

Tech coach Mike Leach let the story be told nationally without granting access to his celebrity kicker. On a team where Heisman Trophy candidates Graham Harrell and Mike Crabtree went long stretches without being made available for interviews, Leach wasn’t ready to let media near the walk-on kicker.

That didn’t keep the requests from pouring in.

Tech media relations director Chris Cook said Kimmel, DeGeneres and the news magazine show “Inside Edition” wanted to air Williams’ story and inquired about his availability.

“The most determined was the CBS Evening News,” Cook said. “They stayed on us for a long time, even to the point where they said Katie Couric had caught wind of the story and was very interested. It was the kind of thing that would run at the end of their newscast.”

Williams, when asked about the craziest development stemming from his sudden fame, didn’t mention the famous people. It was the response of the ordinary people that blew him away.

“Facebook just exploded,” he said. “Lots of friends from places all over the country – Ball State, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Washington. Completely random places. I don’t even know any people there. So that’s probably the funniest, the craziest thing that’s really happened to me.”

Nothing about how Williams’ career started suggested such an interesting chapter would crop up in the story. In high school, he blasted kickoffs through the end zone but tried only a few field goals. Once his team got into the red zone, Williams said, they were pretty good about scoring touchdowns.

With a modest resume, he walked on at Tarleton State two years ago, but quickly soured on the program.

“I disagreed with a lot of things the coaches did,” he said. “I didn’t necessarily like them. They didn’t talk to me. They didn’t tell me things. That was kind of a big turn-off for me is they weren’t communicating with some of their players.”

He left the program before playing in a game, intent on letting his freshman year of college unfold like any other student. Though Williams remained at Tarleton for two years, he filed the necessary enrollment papers at Tech a year ago so that he could transfer for the fall of 2008.

Little did he know how eventful the semester would be.

The feel-good story has remained so because Williams is perfect on 29 extra points, lending needed stability to the kicking game, and made two of three field goals. One came in the Nov. 1 upset of No. 1 Texas. Tech players treat Williams much the same way they do other teammates, which is to say his fame makes him no more immune than anyone else to razzing and practical jokes.

A few days ago, as Williams did a local television interview, a teammate bent down below camera level and yanked the kicker’s pants down. Standing in his workout undershorts, Williams kept a straight face as he finished answering questions.

“He came in, made plays and did his job, which is to make kicks,” safety Darcel McBath said. “That’s all we asked of him. His first game, went 9-for-9. From that point on, he’s one of us.”

To comment on this story:

don.williams@lubbockonline.com 766-8734

jeff.walker@lubbockonline.com 766-8735