As 1st round maybe not I think this pick was to replace Khris Barnes who could move to backup ST role
Isn't that a cause for concern jumping to the NFL where he probably will be expected to play more?
They can bring Walker along more slowly because they still have Barnes. They can ease Wyatt in because they still have Slayton to hopefully develop. Long term you want these guys to be high snap players but hopefully with some depth elsewhere, you don't need to do it right away.
It’s easy (and fun) to clown on the Packers for not selecting a wide receiver to offset Sir Moans A lot. But at this spot on the board, there was little value in the receiver class. There are lots of targets the Packers can look at one day two that would have constituted a reach had they grabbed one in this spot.
Adding Walker to a linebacker corps featuring De’Vondre Campbell is flat-out unfair. Walker has the potential to be the steal of the draft. In the course of the nation’s love affair with teammate Nakobe Dean, Quay Walker was too often lost in the shuffle. He was the second rank corner on my board, ahead of Dean, who slipped out of the first round altogether.
The pre-draft question with Walker was whether or not a team would correctly identify his role. Among this year’s linebackers, he is as gifted in an off-ball, coverage, keep-me-clean prospect as there is. In that role, he has the potential to be a star.
And it’s just that role that the Packers have selected Walker to play. It’s the style they embraced with De’Vondre Campbell, who went from free agent afterthought to destroyer of worlds in a Green Bay system that asked him to play see-ball-get-ball football from depth, rather than attacking the line of scrimmage as a pulling-guard-detonator.
Georgia used Walker as their space eradicator, sliding Walker out into the spot known as the ‘Apex Cover Down’, the spot between the offensive tackle and slot receiver. It’s known in coaching parlance as the RPO-eraser, the corridor that teams like to target on quick-breaking RPOs with slant and post patterns.
Back to the earlier points on linebackers writ large, Walker profiles as an off-ball, see-it-find-it linebacker in Bear fronts. He isn’t someone who can slide down to the edge in the pros; he just lacks the in-line play strength to stand up tackles, who can comfortably gallop over his smaller frame.
That’s fine! Find out what players do and put them in positions to succeed. Walker is a ferocious blitzer, someone who can comfortably mug along any of the interior gaps in pressure packages or slip over to the edge in zone-pressure situations.
His real value, however, will come in coverage. Walker is one of the few who can really move in space and match up to tight ends — he has the agility, length, and smarts to read and redirect, and then match bigger-bodied tight ends at the catch-point.
He has long arms and is comfortable muddying up passing lanes. And his ability to shift from blitzer to dropper without blinking (as comfortable attacking the pocket as he is sliding into space) will make him a real weapon in zone-pressure packages where he is mugged down on the line – the key to those looks being that the offense really thinks the pressure is coming. If your backer is a poor blitzer, offenses aren’t as worried.
Walker’s strengths marry up perfectly with where the NFL is currently at – and the Packers are looking to be at the forefront of that evolution. He is essentially an oversized safety who will allow teams to run what they traditionally would from a three-safety set but with a linebacker body on the field. In the Packers system he will be a star – and quickly.
