The National Football League offensive lineman plays in the range between anonymity and blame. He fills your TV screen only when he jumps offside or gets beat in pass protection or comes back to the huddle with a wedge of sod in his faceguard. He never touches the football. It doesn’t hurt if he has an active brain, but the job mostly rewards size and strength, holding his ground against 300-pound snorters who are bigger and faster than he is. One measure of his accomplishment in the NFL is that you don’t remember his name.

Larry Williams, the University’s new athletic director, toiled eight years in those pro football trenches. He had come to the NFL through Notre Dame, where he was twice All-American at guard and tackle, and was drafted by the Cleveland Browns. Williams almost touched the football with the Browns. Before a playoff game against the Colts, they had practiced this tackle-eligible play for a goal-line situation. Williams was to be eligible to catch a pass from Bernie Kosar. “It worked great in practice,” he says. “All week long. I was pumped. I’d thought about my end zone dance.”

So it’s game time at the old Cleveland stadium, and the field is a sheet of ice, with snow blowing in off Lake Erie. Late in the game, they call his play. Williams, number 70, reports to the ref before lining up at tight end. He’s going to catch a TD pass. The play develops just right. He slips off his block and leaks between the linebackers, wide open. “My hands are up. Kosar sees me. We make eye contact. Then he looks me off, and throws to a running back in the flat. The pass is intercepted! And the play is not over; I have a chance to make the tackle. I’m lumbering out in the open field, and I get just creamed. I had gone from anticipating glory to laid out on the ice with a badly sprained ankle.”

Those Cleveland Browns in the mid-1980s were good. Two years in a row they reached the AFC championship game against John Elway’s Denver Broncos. You remember those games. The first, at Cleveland, was the famously exhilarating or heartbreaking comeback by Elway. The Drive. The second, at Denver, Williams recalls as The Fumble. “We ran a trap, perfectly executed against a blitz package. Their cornerback blew his assignment, or he wouldn’t even have been in the play. He got a helmet on the ball, and Ernest [Byner] fumbled as he was crossing the goal line with the winning score.” Williams was that close to the Super Bowl. And to the football. “The ball was on the ground, right there. Just a yard away from me. But I had a guy lying across my legs. I couldn’t reach that ball. This is a recurring dream of mine...” Recovering himself, Williams says, “NFL line play is more technical than you’d think. You had to know where everybody’s supposed to be. What to do against this defense or that.” There were chalk talks. There was film to study. There was...religious instruction. “On the field you hear Reggie White introduce himself. I’m a preacher, he says. Like he’s a man of peace and good will. Next time up, Reggie says, I’m a preacher, you know. On third down and long, I’m a preacher, says Reggie, and you’re about to see God.”

So there was lots to learn, but those off-the-field skull sessions were taught to the lowest level. “Once you’ve got it,” Williams says, “you’ve got it. After college, I was used to really studying.” Not given to idleness, Williams enrolled in evening classes at Cleveland State Law School. When he went to the Chargers as a free agent, he finished law school at the University of San Diego. Then he helped negotiate player contracts with NFL clubs.

His toughest individual match-up in the NFL?

“Howie Long,” he says. “Howie was so quick off the blocks. And sooooo strong. He’d come at you low, and you couldn’t get leverage on him.” Williams, in his Chiles Center office, stands to demonstrate. His hands are at belt level, fending off a conference table as if to hurl it through the window. “Howie Long.”

Firsthand encounters with these bruisers led to four reconstructions of his left shoulder, but Williams emerged from pro football relatively intact. It was time to find another career while his knees worked. Williams practiced business law — mergers and acquisitions — for an Indianapolis-based firm for six years before returning to Notre Dame to direct the licensing and marketing program. It’s hard to imagine the Fighting Irish needing help with branding, but his boss at the time — one Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C. — credits Williams with turning that program around.

Father Bill, in his new post as the University of Portland’s president, wrote recommendations and called other presidents when Williams began casting about for a different challenge. Just last spring, Williams, still only 41, was in the final stages of the athletic director search at John Carroll University, in Ohio. He called Father Bill to tell him, to thank him, and the wheel of career fortune took a sharp spin. Joe Etzel had just tendered his resignation as AD on The Bluff. Would Larry take a look at the University of Portland?

“He’s smart,” says Beauchamp. “He’d practiced law. He’s a man of great integrity, with no tolerance for laziness. He’s a family man. He has competed at the highest level, and he wants to win the right way.” Beauchamp flew Williams to the campus for a whirlwind series of meetings with deans, faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees. “Ordinarily we’d form a committee and conduct a search. But here was a man with all the values we’re interested in, and he was about to get away. We offered him the job.” Williams accepted on the spot.

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