Kenneth Walker III returns to Seattle for the first time since his blockbuster exit this Sunday as he leads out the Kansas City Chiefs against the same Seahawks team he inspired to Super Bowl glory back in February. The running back posted 135 yards on the ground as Mike Macdonald's side beat the New England Patriots at the NFL's showpiece climax in Santa Clara. But instead of extending the Super Bowl MVP, Seattle allowed Walker to hit free agency, where he would sign a three-year $45m deal with the Chiefs as their marquee needle-shoving offseason addition.
Behind Walker Patrick Mahomes' refurbished, reinvigorated dynasty Chiefs are back in Super Bowl contention; he has changed the game entirely for Andy Reid. Next in line - his old flame. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player "It's going to be a special moment for him," said Chiefs quarterback Mahomes.
"You get to go back to the place where you built your career, where you won a Super Bowl. "Those fans are the people that were around him for all of that. Those are a still a lot of the guys that were his teammates, that he grew up with as well in the NFL.
"At the end of the day, you've got to win a football game. He knows we have his back." A merry Seahawks GM John Schneider joked during his side's Super Bowl parade of how Walker had tried to negotiate a new deal with him five minutes earlier, describing the moment as 'weird'. What was instead weirder was the decision not to extend a defining figure in Seattle's Lombardi surge.
Still, it would become a broken Chiefs team's transformative gain, Walker having since provided an MVP-calibre impact to an offense that had lost all identity, all spark, all pizzazz in recent years. Walker leads the NFL with 665 rushing yards at 6.3 yards per carry through six weeks, while averaging a league-most 133 yards on the ground per game and having scored a tied-second-most eight touchdowns from scrimmage. His 760 scrimmage yards are second only to Bijan Robinson, and no back has broken more tackles or averaged more yards after contact per carry than Walker.
In doing so he has dictated a heightened respect for the Chiefs' activity out of the backfield, coupled with the scrambling ability of Mahomes. His immediate threat has unleashed Kansas City's play-action game, and so too Mahomes' freedom to stretch the field with the deep-shot aggression and three-level concepts that have been largely non-existent in the last couple of seasons. It is a Chiefs offense reborn, and Walker has been at the heart of change.
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