2020 Mountain West Football Top 50 Players: #9, UNLV RB Charles Williams
The UNLV running back is the highest-rated Rebels player on our annual countdown of Mountain West football’s best performers.
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Few better bets to let ride.
The UNLV Rebels are entering a new era in 2020 and optimism abounds in the desert, perhaps because they return arguably the best running back in the conference, our next pick in the countdown of Mountain West football’s best players.
Charles Williams’s collegiate career has certainly run the full gamut of highs and lows, beginning with a knee injury that erased almost the entirety of his 2017 season. From there, however, he emerged from a timeshare with former top-50 selection Lexington Thomas and thrived as the lead back in 2019, rushing for 1,257 yards and 11 touchdowns on 217 carries. All three of those figures, plus his 5.93 yards per carry, placed him in the top three in the Mountain West, the only player to do so in all of those categories, which helped him become just the fourth Rebel runner to earn a spot on the all-conference first team.
While we don’t yet know what the first iteration of Marcus Arroyo’s offense will look like, having an established “Chuck Wagon” in the backfield certainly won’t hurt. He’ll continue to receive a lot of attention from Mountain West defenses, but Williams looks like a safe bet to finish his career as one of the best running backs in UNLV history.
