The likelihood of the Seattle Seahawks locking down running back Kenneth Walker III before he’s set to hit the open market next week went down exponentially with the NFL’s deadline for teams to place a franchise tag on pending free agents passing Tuesday afternoon.
A possible replacement if Seahawks don’t re-sign Walker
Walker, a second-round pick in the 2022 NFL Draft by Seattle, finished his fourth pro season on just about as high of a note as possible, winning Super Bowl MVP honors with 135 rushing yards and 26 receiving yards to help the Seahawks beat the New England Patriots for the Lombardi Trophy last month.
After that playoff performance – which came just weeks after Seattle lost its No. 2 running back Zach Charbonnet to a torn ACL – and Walker’s second career regular season of over 1,000 rushing yards, there was suddenly intrigue that the Seahawks could make Walker the third player in general manager John Schneider’s tenure dating back to 2010 they’ve used the franchise tag on. Ultimately, the Seahawks opted not to.
The NFL’s franchise tag explained
Wednesday on Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk, longtime football broadcast analyst and former NFL quarterback Brock Huard shared his view on the situation with Walker. And in his eyes, if the Seahawks were going to prevent Walker from hitting free agency, it would have come much sooner than Tuesday.
“Yeah, I think that decision was made a year ago,” Huard said. “You’re the Seattle Seahawks, you’ve operated this way for two decades with John Schneider, right? And there is evolution in it, they are evolving in this. I think they learned lessons from (using the franchise tag in 2017 on Frank Clark). But if this was a guy you really, really wanted, you do the deal last year. You don’t wait until this point.”
While Walker certainly made a bigger name for himself in the postseason, it apparently wasn’t enough for the Seahawks to deviate from their usual process.
“Bad teams, bad owners, bad (salary) cap management waits till the very end. This is one like, no, I’m going to renegotiate… when the rate is right for me, not when it runs out and now I gotta deal with the market,” Huard continued. “If they wanted K9, they could have done that deal a year ago. They could have got him locked in. So I think that deal, honestly, a lot of that decision was made last year. And then this year certainly his run at the end adds a little pressure… because he was pretty good in big moments down the stretch when it was all on him.”
Catch Brock and Salk from 6-10 a.m. weekdays on Seattle Sports.
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