Kenneth Walker III, the Super Bowl MVP Seattle decided it could live without

Kenneth Walker III

Photo: Time2Football / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 20, 2000 Arlington
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Super Bowl MVP · Super Bowl champion · Doak Walker Award · Walter Camp Award · Unanimous All-American

There is a particular way Kenneth Walker III finishes a run. He takes the first hit without going down, and the second defender usually arrives to find the first one already on the grass. Seattle’s defenders know the move better than anyone, because they spent years trying to tackle him in practice, and on Sunday night they built a whole plan around it. Mike Macdonald’s defense sent bodies at the ball in waves, and the running back who had walked out of the Super Bowl as its most valuable player walked out of Lumen Field with almost nothing.

That is the argument his career has turned into. The Seahawks won a title behind him and then decided, a few weeks later, that the price of keeping him was higher than the price of replacing him. Kansas City disagreed with real money. Every week since, his carries have been read as evidence for one side or the other in an old league quarrel about whether a running back is worth paying at all.

Walker was born on October 20, 2000, in Memphis and grew up in Arlington, a suburb on the city’s north-eastern edge, where he played on both sides of the ball for Arlington High School. Recruiting services rated him a three-star prospect and most major programs looked past him. Wake Forest was the one school from a power conference that offered. In his second college game he took a handoff at his own four-yard line and ran 96 yards, the longest touchdown run in the program’s history.

After that, the numbers went flat. He ran for 579 yards as a freshman and exactly 579 again the following season, when he scored 13 times, inside an offense built on the slow mesh, a run-pass option in which the back is often a decoy whose job is to show the quarterback what the defense intends. He felt limited by it. In January 2021 he transferred to Michigan State.

The move turned a decoy into the center of an offense. He ran for 264 yards and four touchdowns in his first game as a Spartan. On October 30 that year, against sixth-ranked Michigan, he carried for 197 yards and five touchdowns in a 37-33 comeback win in East Lansing, the afternoon that made him a national name. He finished the season with 1,636 yards and 18 touchdowns, won the Doak Walker Award as the country’s best running back, the first Michigan State player to do so, added the Walter Camp Player of the Year award, was a unanimous All-American and placed sixth in the Heisman vote. He skipped his final year of eligibility.

Seattle drafted him in the second round in 2022, 41st overall, after a small farce on draft night: his phone was on Do Not Disturb, the Seahawks’ calls went unanswered, and when he rang back the person who picked up did not know who he was. As a rookie he ran for 1,050 yards and nine touchdowns, joining Curt Warner as the only Seahawks rookies to reach 1,000. He received more first-place votes for Offensive Rookie of the Year than the Jets’ Garrett Wilson, 19 to 18, and still lost the award on total points under the new ranked ballot.

The case against him was never about talent. It was about durability and shape. His second season produced 905 yards. His third was broken up by injuries and ended on injured reserve with an ankle problem in December 2024, after 573 yards. Even in 2025, the first season in which he started all 17 games, he ran for 1,027 yards but scored only five rushing touchdowns, because Zach Charbonnet took most of the carries near the goal line. To a front office that has to pay a quarterback and a defense, that profile, explosive between the 20s, rarely the finisher, often hurt, looked like something a committee could cover. The popular reading of his departure as a blunder skips that history. Seattle had watched four seasons of him, and only one of them was complete.

Then the committee broke. Charbonnet tore his ACL in the divisional round against San Francisco in January, and Walker carried the load from there: 116 yards and three touchdowns in the 41-6 win that day, 111 yards from scrimmage and a touchdown as Seattle beat the Los Angeles Rams 31-27 for the NFC title, and then 27 carries for 135 yards against New England in Super Bowl LX, a 29-13 win. He was named MVP, the first running back to take the award since Terrell Davis in Super Bowl XXXII.

Seattle declined to use the franchise tag, which would have cost about $14.3 million for a single season, and in March he agreed to a three-year deal with Kansas City worth up to $45 million, with $28.7 million guaranteed, reported as the largest contract ever given to a running back in free agency. Andy Reid’s offense, built for years around Patrick Mahomes’s arm, suddenly had a runner to lean on. Walker ran for 173 yards and two touchdowns against Denver in his first game and for a career-high 177 at Las Vegas in early October, which put him beside Jim Brown and O.J. Simpson as the only players with two 170-yard games in their team’s first four of a season. He was the AFC’s offensive player of the month for September, and after six weeks he led the league with 665 rushing yards at 6.3 a carry.

Then came Seattle. On October 25 the Chiefs arrived unbeaten and left as 20-3 losers, and Walker finished with 36 yards on 14 carries against a defense that has now gone 36 straight games without allowing a 100-yard rusher. Macdonald said afterwards that his players knew Walker would still break tackles, so the answer was to get more of them to the ball. Walker, by the account of local reporters, went straight to the locker room without the customary handshakes with his old coach and teammates, a small moment that became a large one online.

One bad night does not undo six good weeks, and it does not settle the argument either. It does show what it costs to stop him: more defenders committed to the run than most teams can spare. The Chiefs play at Denver on November 1, against the defense he ran through in September, and the second half of the season will show whether Seattle’s arithmetic or Kansas City’s money was closer to the truth.

Tags: sports, athletes, NFL, Seattle Seahawks, American football players, Mike Macdonald, Kenneth Walker III, Super Bowl LX, Kansas City Chiefs, Zach Charbonnet