RENTON — The biggest lesson Seahawks running back Kenneth Walker III learned during his rookie season is that sometimes less is more.
It was a lesson — that sometimes it’s best to just hit the hole hard and take a 3-yard run instead of trying to get something more and ending up with even less — Seahawks coaches began teaching him the minute he arrived last spring as the 41st overall pick of the 2022 draft.
But as with many lessons people learn in life, it was one that Walker needed some hands-on experience with before it fully sank in.
The moment it did, at halftime of a Dec. 24 game at Kansas City, has proved to be a turning point for the Seattle offense as the Seahawks used their running attack to win their final two games of the season and advance to the playoffs with a wild-card game Saturday against the 49ers.
Walker had just 16 yards on nine carries as Seattle trailed 17-3 against the Chiefs at frigid Arrowhead Stadium, which came on the heels of a span of four games in which he hadn’t managed more than 47 yards. That was a drought that followed a five-game stretch when Walker, having emerged as the starter in the wake of an injury to Rashaad Penny, had rushed for 88 or more yards four times, seeming to make the transition from Michigan State to the NFL look easy.
And in the locker room at Arrowhead, coach Pete Carroll and running backs coach Chad Morton pulled Walker aside for a brief chat.
“I remember looking him right between the eyes and said, ‘OK, here we go — in this half, let’s get downhill, attack the line of scrimmage and see if that doesn’t give us a little bit of a change that we need,’” Carroll said. “I know Chad said the same thing; I just reiterated.”
Morton said that maybe some of Walker’s early success — he had TD runs of 69 and 74 against the Saints and Chargers in October — had convinced him that what worked in college would also work in the NFL.
But the continual search for the big play was leading to too many times when Walker was getting caught behind the line of scrimmage and first-and-10 was turning into second-and-even-longer.
As Morton noted to Walker, it’s harder to just run past players in the NFL. It’s also harder to outsmart them. Morton recalled showing Walker film of Bobby Wagner and how he can read tells in how running backs line up or take their first step.
“It was just about him trying to do too much,” Morton said of the talks he had with Walker in Kansas City and in meetings during that time. “Just get north-south. Like, it’s OK to take those dirty yards. He’s used to having these big runs, obviously at the beginning of his career and all of the highlight runs he had in college. But they are not all going to be like that. So just go and get the little stuff and go and grind it for a couple yards. … We just kind of harped on it and he just trusted the process and was like ‘you know, I’ve got to change’ because obviously some of this wasn’t working.”
It all began to work a lot better in the second half in Kansas City as Walker had 91 yards on 17 carries in the final two quarters against a Chiefs team that allowed the eighth-fewest rushing yards in the NFL this year.
As Walker explained after that game: “I was just more decisive. The O-line did a great job. It was just up to me to be decisive on what hole to hit and in the second half everything started to open up.”
He carried that lesson through to the games against the Jets and Rams in which he rushed for more than 100 yards in each with a combined 247 on 52 carries against two of the better run defense in the NFL. And aside from a 60-yard run on the first play against New York, there’s been a lot of tough yards — Walker had just 78 yards on 23 carries in regulation against the Rams before breaking off a 20-yarder in overtime that helped set up the winning field goal.
But Walker’s ability to keep hanging in the past two weeks may have impressed Carroll and Morton more than some of the spectacular runs of earlier in the season.
As both noted, Walker missed much of the preseason after having hernia surgery and had just 23 carries in the first five games before having to take over as the starter.
“I think it’s taken quite a while during the season for him to really connect,” Carroll said. “And he’s had kind of an in and out and a slow start, because he was banged up, things like that, to get going. Just took us a while. Took us a while to see him enough so we knew where to direct him and all that.
“… And I’ll take it on myself, Chad and I trying to get the word across. We didn’t communicate well enough to him, we didn’t get it to him soon enough to make the adjustments that really looked pretty obvious so far.”
But as Carroll said, Walker’s late-season surge — which allowed Seattle to have two of its top four rushing games of the year in the final two weeks with 198 and 197 against the Jets and Rams — “couldn’t have come at a better time.”
The 49ers are somewhat of a “pick your poison” defense to go against, ranking first in the NFL in both fewest points and yards allowed. And statistically, they’ve at times been a bit more vulnerable of late against the pass, allowing 365 in a surprisingly narrow 37-34 overtime win over the Raiders on Jan. 1.
But with forecasts calling for a 99% chance of rain, passing may be even more difficult and risky, which could put the onus even more on running well to pull of the upset.
“With the cyclone threatening down there, we may need to run the ball 40 times, 50 times, whatever,” Carroll said. “We’ll see how that goes. It’s huge for us to make that statement. … We’ve been coming and you can really see Kenneth getting together with the guys up front. The rhythm looks way better than it did. And that’s just time, and we have to take some lumps along the way. Fortunately, we’re getting going.”