Jayden Reed<\/a> earned a 73 overall rating which isn’t too shabby for a rookie receiver. Kirk Cousins received an 84 overall which was good for the ninth-best quarterback in the league.<\/p>\nOne player that seemed to fly under the radar in terms of overall rating was Kenneth Walker III.<\/p>\n
The former Michigan State running back and Doak Walker Award winner was listed as the 11th-best running back in the game, earning an 87 overall. That’s a double-digit overall rating increase from his rookie season. He’s tied with Bengals veteran back Joe Mixon for the 11th-best overall rating. Walker is also ahead of guys like Alvin Kamara and Miles Sanders.<\/p>\n
Who is he behind? Well, there are some obvious names ahead of him like Nick Chubb, Christian McCaffery, Derrick Henry, and Saquon Barkley, but he’s within striking distance of Austin Ekeler, Jonathan Taylor, Aaron Jones, and Tony Pollard.<\/p>\n
And he’s just entering his second year in the league.<\/p>\n
As a rookie, Walker took over as the Seahawks’ starter following some injuries in the backfield. He went on to finish with 1,050 yards and nine touchdowns on 4.6 yards per carry. He also didn’t have a single fumble in 228 carries. Including the playoffs, he had 271 total touches without a single fumble. That’s going to keep him in the league for a while.<\/p>\n
Seattle did draft former Michigan and UCLA running back Zach Charbonnet in the second round which should push Walker even more. He’s the starting running back, but he won’t be coasting.<\/p>\n
It’s cool to see former Michigan State stars get respect in the NFL and another 1,000-yard rushing season could make Walker a legit top-10 back in the league.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kenneth Walker III is a fringe top-10 back in the NFL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5835,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[224,191,189],"class_list":["post-5838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pro-spartans","tag-kenneth-walker-iii","tag-michigan-state-football","tag-michigan-state-spartans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spartanshadows.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}