Williams Legacy Lives on at IS4S Salute to Veterans Bowl

By Tim Gayle

The 12th annual IS4S Salute to Veterans Bowl on Tuesday night will be the first one held since former bowl executive Johnny Williams passed away in February, but his fingerprints are all over this year’s game between Jacksonville State and Troy.

Williams coached and served as an athletic director at Troy, went to the University of Alabama as a senior associate athletic director and worked tirelessly with Jacksonville State after he retired from Alabama to start his own college athletics consulting firm.

Five years after starting his company, he was brought to Montgomery to help develop Alabama’s capital city into a bowl destination and became the executive director of the Salute to Veterans Bowl.

“I had the fortune and privilege to get to know him a little bit in my early years at Troy,” Trojan athletic director Kyle George said. “Just knowing his marketing mind — and that’s the background that I came up in, too — and just sharing stories with coaches of his before about how Johnny had these crazy, big ideas that no one else believed but Johnny. And he saw that vision and had a chance to bring this bowl game here, help move Troy to Division I, helped Jacksonville State go to Division I.”

For Williams, any team he touched became his and a personal goal from the very beginning of what was then known as the Camellia Bowl in 2014 was to invite Troy to participate in his game.

A couple of years after launching the bowl game, Williams and ESPN executives hatched the idea of moving the FCS Kickoff to Montgomery. The first participant Williams thought of was Jacksonville State, a program that was competing in FCS before moving up to FBS in 2023. He invited the Gamecocks to participate in the FCS Kickoff three times, including the first two times the game was in Cramton Bowl (2017 and 2018).

“Johnny Williams meant so much to the folks at Jax State,” said Greg Seitz, vice president for athletics at Jacksonville State. “He was a person I would call on and he actually helped me on many of my coaching searches once he got into his consulting business.

“This is probably his dream game for the bowl game and we’re very, very excited to have the opportunity to play in this.”

Gamecock coach Charles Kelly, an Ozark native, had known Williams for years.

“To me, he’s Coach Williams, always has been since I was coming out of high school,” Kelly said. “But I can tell you this: there would be nobody any more excited about this game, in this venue, in this bowl, than he would. I’m very thankful for what he did, not only for football at Troy but for what he did for football in the state of Alabama.”

Troy players will honor Williams at Tuesday night’s game with a “JW” helmet sticker, but the real honor will be watching his beloved Trojans and his adopted Gamecocks renew their rivalry after a 24-year hiatus in the bowl game he created.

“I just wish we had Johnny Williams here to be with us today,” Montgomery mayor Steven Reed said. “I know he’d be smiling, laughing and telling a whole lot of good football stories about both universities all throughout this week. But I know he’s here in spirit.”