While Breece Hall got boosted into the top 50 picks in most drafts over the course of the offseason, at various points you were likely to find the second-highest drafted running back, Ken Walker, just barely scratching the top 100 picks. It’s rather funny in retrospect because a) you can make almost all the same cases against Hall that you could make against Walker and b) Walker’s major bugaboo was that he didn’t catch passes in college and he’s already caught six balls in 76 snaps.
Coming into the season, Walker had two major problems: One was that Rashaad Penny looked extremely good down the stretch last year and figured to be the starting back. While Penny more than paid off his draft stock on performance, he’s literally never been able to stay healthy. Think of him like if James Conner never had his 2021 or 2018 seasons -- some of these may have been fluke injuries, but at some point it’s hard to rely on Penny ever staying healthy. Sure enough, five weeks into the season, Penny is out for the year after being carted off with a fractured fibula.
The other thing that was supposed to hold Walker back was that the Seattle offense was supposed to stink out loud. They were projected as the third-worst offense in the NFL by DVOA. And, to self-report, while I had some skepticism about Russell Wilson succeeding in Denver, I largely agreed with the idea that the Seahawks would be a bad offense. Nothing we’d seen in Geno Smith‘s career would lead us to believe he was actually a good quarterback. Nothing we’d seen from Pete Carroll or his various offensive assistants pointed to what has happened for the first five weeks of the season.
Seattle enters Week 5 first in offensive DVOA and first in passing offense DVOA. Smith has diced opponents and, frankly, made some throws that I don’t think anybody thought he had in him. He didn’t write back, and that’s swell. The NFL would not be the NFL without a few stories like this every season.
Geno Smith (but also Jacoby Brissett) pic.twitter.com/r1uI7rXAzS
— Computer Cowboy (@benbbaldwin) October 11, 2022
The thing about trying to write off these five games as well is ... Smith looks the part too. Even as the Seahawks lost to the Saints, there are throws that would make highlight reels for top-of-the-line quarterbacks. The mythical “If Mahomes Made This Play We’d All Be Talking About It” fan whine actually does stick with some of what Smith has done this year. This is not either of his touchdown throws last week, but watch this:
As great as his two touchdown throws to Tyler Lockett were, this throw from Geno Smith to Noah Fant jumps out as my favorite from Sunday.
— Corbin K. Smith (@CorbinSmithNFL) October 11, 2022
Rolling out to his left, throwing off platform, and makes a perfect throw just over the hands of defender for 32 yards. pic.twitter.com/dSNkPqybEW
I am not saying that Geno is a top-12 quarterback going forward or anything, but there’s enough there to make me feel comfortable believing this isn’t an Alex Smith-Jimmy Garoppolo situation where he’ll eventually crater. He did not look bad in Seattle’s early losses at all.
Finally, one last feather in the Walker situation: Seattle’s defense is absolutely terrible. They’re 31st in DVOA allowed, and outside of a Broncos offense that is barely functional, have allowed 27 or more points in every game this season. At the same time, Seattle is such a run-first team that they’re only 24th in pass attempts per game.
And into that situation steps the second-round rookie...
Season-to-Date
Near the end of the preseason, Walker picked up a hernia that required surgery. He had five carries for 19 yards in Seattle’s first game of the preseason, adding an eleven-yard catch. But he didn’t play in either of the final two preseason games, and that kind of stopped a lot of the hype in its tracks -- compare him to Dameon Pierce, who parlayed a successful preseason into a big immediate role in Houston. Walker would miss Week 1 with the injury as well. Since then, he had been worked in slowly next to Penny.
Walker got a fourth-quarter series to himself against the 49ers in a blowout loss but otherwise split time within series. He’s mostly used like this for each of the first two games of the season. He actually got an early series to himself for the first time against the Lions in the second quarter in Week 4, though he did get called for holding during that drive. More importantly, he was mostly left on the sideline in the fourth quarter, grabbing only three carries on the first drive of the game. Penny left early in the third quarter of Week 5 and Walker seized control of the backfield from the on out.
Does Walker look great? Well, the highlight reel showed this:
Ken Walker TD All-22 pic.twitter.com/GX8vokFuri
— rivers mccown (alt) (@mccownclips) October 11, 2022
Walker’s vision certainly looks good on this run. It’s not like a sexy tackle-breaker or anything, but, well, why do that if you don’t have to? Chris Harris did not exactly look eager to tackle him, but still. What Walker showed against the Saints was good mental agility as well as good physical ability:
Nice idea by Kenneth Walker, although #99 doesn’t bite. pic.twitter.com/v2s1UeM4v2
— Matt Waldman (@MattWaldman) October 10, 2022
Walker has yet to qualify for the NFL Next Gen Stats leaderboards in any of his games -- that should change in Week 6 -- but he hasn’t shown a lot after contact in his first three games. He’s racked up 2.83 yards after contact per attempt per PFF, which puts him a middling 54th out of 99 qualified backs. I’m not going to be the “he’s not explosive!!” guy because I always think that guy sounds silly. Also, you watched Walker in college, right? He’s got upside here. It just hasn’t shown yet.
Empty roads on the wire
To be honest, it’s really less important that Walker show brilliance than the fact that he’s on a running back depth chart that is currently wide open. He’d been dropped in some leagues. He’s the most obvious waiver wire addition of the NFL season to date outside of maybe Jeff Wilson in Week 2. DeeJay Dallas has one career game with more than eight carries. Travis Homer is currently out. The Seahawks claimed Tony Jones on waivers but obviously won’t have the same trust in him as they would in a back who was actually in camp with them. Talent, investment, and opportunity have come together in a way that is rarely seen. I’m not going to give you a FAAB budget on him because unless FAAB is required to make any move in your league, I’d simply trust myself enough to drop the whole thing on Walker. The odds of a better situation coming together are microscopically slim.
I do think the early returns have been faint enough to not expect the best-case scenario on him. He’s a good back, but we probably shouldn’t expect him to be an RB1 right away. The offense has been great, but they probably won’t be as great for the rest of the season on pure regression. I do think he’s an intriguing play against the Cardinals this week as an RB2 because Arizona’s box-stacking tendencies can at times lead to big rushing games, but to me that’s reliant on the Seahawks doing the read-option plays that Philadelphia did with Jalen Hurts, and I don’t think that’s really the way they want to play.
How I kind of visualize this is oddly to go back to a player earlier in the article, a Dameon Pierce-esque situation. Pierce’s talent flashed a little harder than Walker has so far, but both teams want to run the ball and Walker finds himself in a volume role that is hard to top from a fantasy perspective. That will give him the chance to hit his upside cases in the same way that Pierce found the 75-yard run against the Chargers.
But unlike Pierce, I don’t think there’s a lot of downside with Walker as a weekly proposition. There’s no weird Rex Burkhead cult in the Seattle front office. If Walker outplays Dallas on passing downs, I wouldn’t be shocked to see him wind up with 75 percent of the weekly touches. That’s why I go back to Walker as such an easy pickup -- it’s not only the fact that a high ceiling exists, it’s also the fact that the floor feels very safe as well. The offense could fall apart and the volume would save him. Seattle’s defense could improve and this would still be a team that wants to run. I’d feel very comfortable plugging Walker in as my RB2 for the rest of the season, and you might just get a league-winning surprise if he outplays what he’s shown so far.