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"I knew the league had better girls" – Lou Williams explains why college never appealed to him
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- "I knew the league had better girls" – Lou Williams explains why college never appealed to him
Despite getting selected 45th overall in the 2005 NBA Draft, Lou Williams didn't let this deter him from carving out a fruitful 17-year NBA career highlighted by three Sixth Man of the Year awards.
After a standout career playing for South Gwinnett in Snellville, Georgia, Williams had made up his mind about making the preps-to-pros leap. However, he admitted he had second thoughts when he didn't hear his name called in the first round, saying perhaps he should have gone to college to further hone his game.
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Going to college was an afterthought for Williams
A 6'2″ combo guard who was the top-ranked shooting guard in the country during his senior year in high school, Williams had no thoughts about attending college; he made the rounds and paid the interested schools visits, but deep inside, he had already made his decision to head to the NBA.
"Listen, man, my senior year, I started living a different life. I start experiencing different things. I'm meeting different people," Williams recalled . "So, I never could wrap my head around 6 a.m. workouts, trying to figure out what I'mma eat."
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Playing college basketball is a lot like boot camp: the coach is the taskmaster, and the players are privates told what to do and when. Williams candidly admitted he didn't have it in him to go through all of that.
"Never sounded good to me, bro," Williams stated.
"The talent was there. The discipline wasn't there," Hall of Famer Tracy McGrady commented.
"The discipline wasn't there to do the things that they needed me to do at the college level. The work that it takes, the discipline that it takes," Williams responded.
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Looked at the NBA as an internship
With his eyes on the prize, Williams understood that even if he made it to the NBA, he might not get the chance to play right away, and he was perfectly alright with that; he had already embraced the notion that the first few years would be like an internship, which meant absorbing as much experience and information as possible.
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"I'm going to look at this like a job. If this is a job and this is a career, if I get drafted anywhere, if I get a foot in the door, it becomes an internship to me now. If I'm not going to be able to play year one, year two, this is an internship," he stressed.
"But if this is what I want to do for my life, I don't want to waste no time with college. And so, it just never was appealing to me," Williams added. "I went on my visits. I didn't care about the girls. I knew the league had better girls. I wasn't tripping on that. I didn't care about the parties. I knew the league partied better. I knew all of that."
Took a while to get going
True to form, Williams' NBA career started slowly, with just 91 games and 9.2 minutes per game. But in his third season, he finally got the chance to ball out, averaging 11.5 points per game. He never looked back after that breakthrough, establishing himself as a reliable scorer, whether as a spot-starter or a full-time sixth man.
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Williams may have lacked discipline at the very beginning, but he more than made up for it when he stepped into the Association.
This story was originally published by Basketball Network on Oct 5, 2026, where it first appeared in the Off The Court section. Add Basketball Network as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
