Javonte Williams didn’t just Taki good game. The man backed it up. All over the Raiders’ hindquarters.
“Does this mean you’re back?” I asked the Broncos tailback Sunday night after he paced Denver in rushing (61 yards) and receiving (50 yards) in a sweet, cathartic 34-18 whupping of the Raiders.
“I don’t think I went (anywhere),” the affable Williams replied with a grin. “I mean, I’ve been in Denver the whole time.
“But if you want to say I’m back, I guess I’m back.”
Oh, he’s back.
The battering Broncos bell cow, who famously gave up his favorite snack chips — Takis — to get back to a leaner, meaner fighting weight for coach Sean Payton, followed up that 77-rush-yard outing against the Jets in Week 4 with arguably his best game in about 11 months.
Williams’ 111 all-purpose yards were his most in orange and blue since piling up 110 in a win at Buffalo last November. His receiving total was his third-best as a Bronco, and the most since posting 65 yards in catches during that infamous Week 1 loss at Seattle in 2022.
“I think Javonte ran hard,” Payton said after the game. “I think you guys (in the media) felt that. I did. There was a little bit more stress on that room relative to the two backs knowing they were going to get a bigger workload, as opposed to three total.”
The Raiders came into Week 5 having given up the ninth-most rushing yards to running backs in the NFL (114.5 per game) and allowing the fifth-most catches per game to tailbacks (5.5), so maybe we should’ve seen this workload coming.
That said, Williams didn’t just run with it — he ran with a burst that harkened to his rookie season of 2021, before surgery to repair an ACL torn in 2022 knocked several peps off his step.
“I was really proud with how he played,” Payton continued. “I have not seen the film. But I think we blocked (for) him pretty good.”
That blocking proved exceptional, especially on the part of center Luke Wattenberg, during a second-quarter screen that No. 33 popped for 26 yards from the Denver 10.
Although the 220-pound Williams was just as happy, when freed in open space, to do the heavy lifting himself. About two minutes into the second stanza, on a third-and-34 at the Raiders 46, Williams had turned a dump-off by quarterback Bo Nix into a 13-yard gain, one that ended with him hurdling the Raiders’ Nate Hobbs.
Getting a little something out of lot of nothing got the hosts to the Vegas 33, setting up a 51-yard Will Lutz field goal and the Broncos’ first points of the afternoon.
Timeout for trivia: On Oct. 17, 2021, the Broncos tailback pulled a similar kind of leap here against the Raiders, hopping over Vegas safety Tre’von Moehrig. Don’t you love it when history repeats itself?
“It’s starting to feel more like how I used to feel back in the day,” said Williams, whose two-week stretch of 138 rush yards are his most productive consecutive appearances since running for 85 yards on the Chiefs and 79 on the Bills last fall.
“Just being comfortable, just having fun playing football …”
“Was it not fun before?” a reporter asked.
“I’m not going to say it wasn’t fun,” the Broncos tailback countered. “But you know how it goes — ups and downs, things like that. So yeah, we’re just feeling good right now. Got to keep it rolling.”
Williams has got it rolling so hard right now that after slamming into one Vegas defender, the fourth-year veteran popped right back up, flexed his biceps and signaled he wanted to eat some more.
“I mean, that was just like I said — I’d just been seeing everything that people (have been) saying, I’ve (been) hearing all that,” the Broncos runner explained.
“So, I mean, I just had to let them know: ‘You feel me?’”
Like a hammer, dude. Straight to the shins.