The curious case of Kenneth Walker

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I knew someone on Seattle’s coaching staff was utterly smitten with Kenneth Walker.

I just wasn’t sure who it was until last week when offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb unleashed a veritable geyser of praise after he was asked about the third-year running back.

Ah ha. So that’s who has been singing the running back’s praises to the likes of Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated’s MMQB.

I think I know why Grubb is doing this, too. It has to do with what is a fairly alarming trend in Walker’s productivity, which I’ll explain in depth in just a minute.

First, I want to pass along a couple of smaller, bite-sized morsels:

Seahawk opponents subject to Murphy’s law

Daniel Jeremiah is an analyst for the NFL Network with a background in scouting. In fact, he was working with the Eagles back in 2012 and told me that Philadelphia — which was still coached by Andy Reid — was planning on picking Russell Wilson in the third round only to have the Seahawks snatch him up before he got to the Eagles.

Here’s what he had said about Murphy on Tuesday:

Live by the blowout, die by the blowout

Last weekend, the Mariners swept the Mets in a three-game series by a combined total of 22-1 and everything was awesome.

On Tuesday, they opened a three-game series in Detroit with a 15-1 loss that was decidedly not awesome.

The Mariners are a game and a half back of the Astros. There’s a quarter of the season left, and it’s quite clear that we’re going to sweat (and swear) our way through each and every one of those games if Seattle is in fact going to make the playoffs.

I took a pause from all that to write about the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way in my latest column for the Tacoma News Tribune. The Mariners could actually — you know — follow the example set by their next-door neighbors who decided that a team should do more than simply try to squeak out a playoff berth each and every season.

The example I used in the column is one I’ve mentioned here before: the Seahawks firing Pete Carroll because the ownership felt the team had plateaued.

There’s another move that fits this template, though: the Seahawks’ acquisitions in March 2013.

The Seahawks didn’t really need to do anything. They’d come within a minute of reaching the conference title game in 2012. They had a young defense, a young quarterback and every reason to think that they were a team that needed only a little seasoning to get over the hump.

No one would have blamed them if they did exactly what the Mariners did the past two offseasons, which is to say, “We like our team, we think we’re on the upswing and we’re not going to get overly aggressive.”

Instead, the Seahawks got overly aggressive, starting with the acquisition of Percy Harvin.

They gave up a first-round pick and next year’s third-round pick for the right to pay Harvin a top-shelf contract.

Then, when free agency began, the Seahawks signed Cliff Avril.

And then they signed Michael Bennett.

These are exactly the type of significant additions that the Mariners have declined to make over the past two offseasons. Instead, they’ve opted to sit and hope the young nucleus matures organically and that their tortoise-like persistence will prevail over the hare-like aggressiveness of a team like the San Diego Padres.

And for the fourth consecutive year, the Mariners have a team that is going to win right around 90 games and might make the playoffs depending on how the rest of the league fares.

While this is markedly better than the Mariners have been for much of the previous 23 years, it is also frustrating. Very frustrating.

This is because we’ve seen what a team can do when it decides that now is the moment to go for it because that’s what the Seahawks have done. Repeatedly.

Trading for Leonard Williams didn’t put the Seahawks over the hump last season, and I suppose you can look at the Seahawks’ addition of Harvin as a mistake.

Speaking strictly on what Seattle gave up to acquire Harvin and what they got from him as a player, it was a terrible trade. He missed most of that first season because of a hip injury.

However, I’ve come to see it a little bit differently. Coming out of the 2012 season, the Seahawks recognized they had a unique opportunity. The fact their quarterback was on a rookie contract freed them up to take some chances, and they did not just with Harvin, but by signing Avril and then Bennett.

Instead of just hoping they had enough and that things went right, they decided to get aggressive and took some chances because they wanted to be more than just a viable contender with a chance of winning a championship.

The result was that Seattle had a roster so stocked it didn’t need everything to go right to win the championship. They had some wiggle room in case some things didn’t pan out.

Could the Seahawks have won the Super Bowl without trading for Harvin? Absolutely.

Would the Seahawks have won it without him? Probably though his second-half kickoff return for a touchdown is what iced the game.

Should the Seahawks have traded for him? Hell yes. You play to win the game, and the Seahawks won the game that matters most that season.

Seahawks to run with a Walker

OK. I’ve now dismounted my soapbox and will return to the place where this newsletter started: Kenneth Walker.

More specifically, the offensive coordinator’s opinion of him:

Ah ha!

So that’s who Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated’s MMQB talked to when he came out and visited the Seahawks training camp earlier this month. I knew someone was gushing about Walker when I came across this paragraph in Breer’s report.

Except I’m having a hard time reconciling that with one very pesky statistic relating to Walker: He’s not all that productive on well-blocked plays.

I’m serious. There’s data and everything:

If this makes your head hurt, it’s OK. I had to look twice at it to make sure I understood, and I’ll explain what it shows starting with the measurements:

EPA = Expected Points Added. It measures how much a given play improved a team’s scoring chances. It is increasingly being used as the go-to measurement for the effectiveness of a given offensive play.

The x-axis shows EPA on plays that Pro Football Focus deems were “perfectly blocked.” In other words: How much did the running back improve his team’s scoring chances when everyone else did their job.

The guys who are furthest to right provided the most value:

The y-axis measures what happens when a play is not perfectly blocked. In other words, who makes the most out of a situation when things go wrong.

The higher a players name is on the vertical axis, the more that player minimized the effect of imperfect blocking.

How to read the chart:

• The best backs — according to this standard — will be the ones in the upper right corner. They maximized the results when they had good blocking, minimized the negative results when they had poor blocking.

• The least valuable backs will be the ones in the lower left corner, which means they didn’t gain as much as other backs when the blocking was good and they lost more than other backs when the blocking was bad.

Now look at where Ken Walker is:

He’s all by himself there in the upper left corner, which means he’s pretty good at overcoming poor blocking, but not very good at capitalizing on those plays when he receives good blocking.

In other words, he appears to be the kind of back who’ll gain you 3 yards on a play that should go nowhere. Unfortunately, he’ll also gain you 3 yards on a play that should pick up 5.

This is not ideal!

Now let’s get a couple of caveats out of the way:

• Grading football plays is inherently subjective, and that is especially true when it comes to blocking and pass coverage. The grader doesn’t know for sure what the player was asked to do so how can he evaluate how well it was done?

• This chart does not reflect the frequency with which a running back received good blocking or bad blocking, and that’s a significant consideration. After all, if a running back receives a steady dose of bad blocking, it’s reasonable to believe he will stop trusting his blocking altogether.

So why is Grubb singing Walker’s praises?

No. 1: He thinks Walker can be the most productive back on the team.

If Grubb didn’t feel that way, Walker wouldn’t be the clear-cut starter like he is.

No. 2: Grubb also thinks Walker can be as effective on well-blocked plays as he was on imperfectly blocked plays last season.

It’s possible this will be due to the blocking itself improving. Or maybe it’s because Grubb believes that the best way to get Walker to buy-in and trust the blocking is by providing a steady diet of praise.

Either way, I think that this is a very clear and deliberate approach taken by Seattle’s new offensive coordinator to try and get one of the players he inherited to play up to the potential the coordinator sees.

Walker’s usage and his productivity are two things that I’m going to be watching very closely through the first month of the regular season.