Why Alabama’s Ryan Williams has ballet world in awe

College football is about the grand stage, big moments and extravagant introductions.

For Ryan Williams, that greeting came at the climax of the sports' most-watched game of the opening month. The Alabama freshman receiver's acrobatic heroics didn't just secure the 75-yard, game-winning touchdown against No. 2 Georgia, it was a statement.

It was art.

There were 100,000-plus slacked jaws in Bryant-Denny Stadium that September night - stunned by a catch and everything that followed. The ABC-TV audience peaked at 14.1 million just as Williams made his salutation.

Down in Fairhope, Don Prosch was in that television audience, awed for the same reason as Christopher Stuart in Birmingham. It wasn't just the speed, the concentration or the footwork. Prosch and Stuart saw something incredibly rare in Williams and they're uniquely qualified to assess it.

Now in his early 70s, Prosch was a multi-sport athlete who played football before finding his true calling. For years, he was a professional dancer - studying under the legendary Martha Graham in New York before touring Europe with renowned ballet companies.

What he saw in Williams that night against Georgia was incredible.

"Well, he's just got such eloquence about him," Prosch said. "His footwork is much more like dance than football. Football players, generally speaking, are power forward - big quads - mostly forward and back. He's, he's got very light footwork. I mean, comparable to a dancer like Fred Astaire. His footwork is so light. He's a very atypical athlete."

Truly.

That catch helped save Alabama's season, giving it a marquee win over Georgia that's keeping the Tide in playoff conversations entering Saturday's visit to No. 14 LSU. A night game in Tiger Stadium is yet another grand stage to challenge Williams in his debut season.

Georgia coach Kirby Smart said Williams' impressive toolkit goes beyond his footwork.

"I call it suddenness, twitch, quickness," Smart said. "We always refer to it as initial quickness. He has elite initial quickness. Feet are a part of that but not the only part that makes him special. It's the combination.

"A lot of guys have great ball skills and sometimes they have great quickness but they don't have great long speed. But when you combine track speed with initial quickness and ball skills, you get a really special player, which he is."

Special enough to lead Alabama in receptions (35), yards (702), and touchdown catches (seven). He led the nation in average yards per catch for several weeks and is now 11th with 20.1 yards per reception. Among freshmen, he leads the FBS with 702 receiving yards, a nose ahead of Ohio State phenom Jeremiah Smith's 678.

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Prosch, a lifelong football fan, struggled to think of players who combined the same skillsets as Williams. He sees a little Barry Sanders at times but no one-to-one comparison fully sticks in his mind. There have been several moments since that exemplify that but the 75-yard touchdown that beat Georgia put everything on display.

Alabama had just fallen behind the Bulldogs for the first time in a frantic scene in Tuscaloosa. The freshman receiver was one-on-one with cornerback Julian Humphrey when Jalen Milroe's pass was thrown slightly behind the trajectory of the route.

So Williams adjusted, twisting in midair for the first act of this sequence. Securing the pass at the Georgia 46-yard line with his back to the goal line, Williams quickly spun to sprint in the right direction just as safety KJ Bolden arrived. He and Humphrey were converging on Williams near the 35 when he turned the two elite defensive backs into a blooper reel. Planting his left foot, Williams did a counterclockwise spin that caused the defenders to collide as he slipped to the inside for the final 30-yard sprint into history.

"He's got super spatial awareness, which I find unusual for a lot of athletes," Prosch said. "He can stop on a dime. I mean, that play where he, you know, scored that touchdown against Georgia at the end is just very expressive of that. I mean, he literally stopped on a dime, rotated. He actually floated in the air."

Stuart, the artistic director at the Alabama Ballet in Birmingham, was equally impressed. He noticed Williams' blend of agility, flexibility and timing.

That touchdown pulled it all together.

"He had two defenders around him, and he did this kind of like, really slow, intricate turn," Stuart said. "And in ballet terms, that is called a soutenu. And basically, you're like, in this kind of pencil shape, and you just turn around yourself in transition. And I laughed because the defenders were just baffled. And they were like, 'Where did he go? How did he stop so quickly?' And, yeah. That was really impressive."

Prosch, whose nephew Jay Prosch played fullback at Auburn in 2012 and 2013, pointed to another play Williams made in the Georgia game. The receiver, who graduated high school a year early to play at Alabama, made an acrobatic 54-yard catch with All-American safety Malaki Starks in coverage. The deep pass arrived just as Starks took a swipe. Williams bobbled the ball high into the air, finally securing it with his back to the end zone and Starks closing in for the hit.

Again, Williams stuck his cleat into the turf as a pivot point for another counter-clockwise spin. This time he was tackled short of the prize but again left the dance professionals impressed.

"The way he bobbled the ball in the air while maintaining his balance and orientation towards the goal line," Prosch said, "is not unlike a ballet dancer doing multiple turns and stepping out of them only to then lift a partner up and over his head without missing a beat or falling off balance. His facility and grace is exceptional and rare."

But the marriage of ballet and football isn't.

Before coming to Birmingham, Stuart spent 16 years with Nashville Ballet. There he worked with multiple Tennessee Titans football players, including Eddie George and Darrin Reaves, a UAB product from Birmingham who spent time with the Carolina Panthers and Kansas City Chiefs. Lynn Swan famously took ballet classes. So did Herschel Walker.

Stepping out of the football world and into a ballet studio can be a head trip for some of these players.

"I think a lot of the times they're very nervous because they don't know what to expect," Stuart said. "And they think it's what you see in movies or commercials. It's very dainty and it's very soft. And they start doing it and they start repeating it and they're like 'Oh, my gosh, this is so hard. Like, how do you do this all the time?'"

For Williams, the moves look instinctual and they extend well beyond the Georgia game. A quick jab step in his collegiate debut against Western Kentucky caused two defensive backs to collide as he ran for a 55-yard touchdown. Another quick hesitation the next week against South Florida sent a defender flying to open a lane for a 43-yard touchdown.

At Vanderbilt, he put a pre-catch move on a corner, then a post-catch juke that caused more DB friendly fire on a 13-yard gain. Later in the game, he made a midair adjustment for a 58-yard touchdown that, again, led to two defenders colliding.

But it's that multi-step game-winner against Georgia that has the dance community talking the most.

"He actually floated in the air," Prosch said. "We call it Ballon. And when he turned back, he was actually in the air for a pause, for a brief moment. And then when he went ahead and turned around, he was off like lightning and they couldn't catch him at all. So, he's very elusive."

Heading to Baton Rouge this weekend, Williams will again be on a legendary stage.

He won't have the friendliest of audiences this time but it's the kind of moment built for this football prodigy.

Alabama would love an encore from that Saturday night with Georgia.

The season's riding on it.