Zach Charbonnet, the Seahawks back whose job opened while he was hurt

Zach Charbonnet

Photo: Maize & Blue Nation / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 8, 2001 Bellflower
Occupation	Footballer
Individual awards	Super Bowl champion · FWAA first-team All-American · AP Pac-12 Newcomer of the Year

On Sunday night Seattle beat the unbeaten Kansas City Chiefs, and the running back who carried the offense was not one most people would have predicted a year ago. Zach Charbonnet had been activated three days earlier and still watched from the sideline in street clothes, held back by coaches who wanted one more week of practice from him. Across the field stood Kenneth Walker III, the partner with whom he split the Seahawks backfield for three seasons, now in a Chiefs uniform. The yards went to Emanuel Wilson.

That is the strange position Charbonnet occupies. The job he spent his professional career sharing is open. Walker left in free agency, the backfield has been patched together all autumn, and the thing Seattle has missed most is what he did best last season, which was finishing drives in the end zone. What he does not yet have is a single game snap on a rebuilt knee, and his contract runs out when the season ends.

He comes from Southern California. Charbonnet was born on January 8, 2001, in Bellflower and grew up in Camarillo, the son of Mark, who is African-American, and Seda, who is part Cambodian and part Chinese and came to the United States from France. He did not play organized football until seventh grade. By the end of high school at Oaks Christian in Westlake Village he had run for 4,741 yards and 62 touchdowns, and the main recruiting services ranked him among the top six running backs in the country. He chose Michigan.

Knee surgery met him almost as soon as he arrived in Ann Arbor, but he was healthy by the opener and started it. His freshman season ended with 726 yards and 11 touchdowns, a program record for a first-year player, including a three-touchdown afternoon in a double-overtime win over Army. Then the pandemic shortened the 2020 season, his carries dwindled to 19 in five games, and in January 2021 he entered the transfer portal. He said he wanted to be closer to his family, and UCLA, which had lost him once in recruiting, got a second chance.

Under Chip Kelly the move paid off at once. In 2021 he shared the work with Brittain Brown and still ran for 1,137 yards and 13 touchdowns, and the Associated Press named him the Pac-12’s newcomer of the year. As a senior he was better: 1,359 yards at seven yards a carry, 14 rushing touchdowns, a 198-yard game against a ranked Utah and another against Stanford, and first-team All-American honors from the Football Writers Association of America as an all-purpose player. He passed on the extra year of eligibility the pandemic had granted and entered the draft.

Seattle took him in the second round in 2023, 52nd overall, a year after drafting Walker, and the arrangement that followed came to define him. As a rookie he started twice, carried 108 times for 462 yards and scored his first touchdown in a loss at Dallas. In 2024 he played all 17 games and, whenever Walker was hurt, showed what a fuller workload looked like, with two touchdowns against Miami and later 134 rushing yards and two more scores at Arizona, his first 100-yard game in the league. Last season, under head coach Mike Macdonald, the split nearly evened out. Walker ran for 1,027 yards; Charbonnet ran for 730 and led the team with 12 touchdowns, including 110 yards and two scores in a late-December win at Carolina.

The case against him has always been written in decimals. Those 730 yards came on 184 carries, a fraction under four yards each, and Walker was plainly the more efficient and more explosive runner of the pair. Charbonnet has never reached 1,000 yards in a pro season. The front office’s own choices read like a verdict as well: when Walker left, Seattle did not simply hand the job to the injured incumbent but spent the last pick of the first round on Notre Dame’s Jadarian Price, a selection The Ringer graded as a reach. The counterargument is quieter. He has not fumbled once in three NFL seasons, while every back who has carried the ball in his absence this year has lost at least one, and analysts at Bleacher Report noted after the Carolina game that he has tended to produce whenever he is handed the majority of the work.

The knee gave way in the second quarter of the divisional-round playoff game against San Francisco on January 17, a 41-6 win, after five carries for 20 yards. Three weeks later Walker carried 27 times for 135 yards, took the MVP award, and Seattle beat New England 29-13 in Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium. Charbonnet earned his ring from injured reserve and had surgery on February 20.

The offseason took away his partner and handed him a rival. Walker signed a three-year deal worth up to $45 million with Kansas City in March, and Price arrived in April. General manager John Schneider called Charbonnet’s recovery outlook “very positive,” and the team opened the season with him on the physically unable to perform list. The backfield has struggled without him. Price went on injured reserve in early October, Wilson was averaging 3.5 yards a carry before Sunday, and the fumbles piled up while the champions lost three of four. Charbonnet returned to practice on October 1 and was activated on October 22, just inside his three-week window. Macdonald said there had been no setback and that he was sticking to the plan of a full week of work: “Zach’s doing great, and we’ll go into next week and see how it goes.”

Seattle is 4-3 and plays the Chicago Bears next, the first realistic chance for Charbonnet’s season to begin, with Price eligible to come back from injured reserve around the same time. The rest of the year will decide what kind of contract he is offered in March, as the lead back the Seahawks finally trust with the ball or as the reliable half of somebody else’s committee.

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

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