Nothing about the setup in Los Angeles has changed, which is the point. Williams is back to sharing the room with Blake Corum for a third straight camp, and beat reporters watching practice keep saying the same thing they said last summer: he's the one finding the crease first. McVay has never needed to manufacture a bigger role for him because the one he already has works. Corum spells him, keeps him fresh, and disappears when the game is close and the ball needs to go through Williams instead.
What makes him hard to replace is patience most backs his size don't have. He presses the line, lets the double-team commit, and cuts off it late instead of bouncing outside looking for a home run. It's not an explosive style, it's a conversion-machine style, and it's why he's parked in the red zone on early downs no matter who else is in the backfield. The passing-game work is the newer piece: he's turned into a real check-down and screen option, not just a decoy split out wide, which is what keeps him on the field on third downs instead of ceding the down to Corum.
The honest risk isn't Corum, it's Williams' own ankles. He's already missed a stretch of one season to a sprain and battled a foot issue that kept him out of this offseason's team workouts entirely. A back who wins with patience instead of speed has less margin when the wheels aren't fully healthy, and if Corum ever looks capable of running the same downhill style on early downs, the Rams have shown they're comfortable feeding him more.
Josh Jacobs is the name doing the most damage to that patience argument, because Jacobs is the one who's actually gotten worse. His burst has faded a year into Green Bay, and now he's carrying an open legal investigation that's already pulled him away from the team once this offseason with no real end date attached. Williams has been the guy who shows up every week doing the same unglamorous thing for three straight seasons; Jacobs is the older back trending down with genuine uncertainty hanging over whether he's even available every Sunday. That's not a close call.
