Rookie linebacker Quay Walker will change the way the Green Bay Packers play defense

It had to be a wide receiver. In order to maximally support Aaron Rodgers without Davante Adams, the Green Bay Packers were karmically obligated to secure an elite pass catcher through the draft. Unless, of course, they could find a player who could paradigmatically alter the way they play defense. Georgia Swiss Army knife Quay Walker’s selection doesn’t guarantee he will be a franchise-altering piece because of his play, but rather signals the team’s desire to fundamentally change the way it plays defense, getting bigger as much of the league gets smaller.

In order to combat spread offenses, teams living in 11 personnel with three receivers and one tight end on the field, defensive base 4-3 and 3-4 sets gave way to nickel, with five defensive backs to account for the speed offenses could throw at opponents. Most linebackers can’t run with quick, modern move tight ends, much less receivers, necessitating a move away from linebackers and toward cover players.

That is, unless you have linebackers who can cover.

“We identified [Walker] very early in the process as a guy that would be an excellent fit,” general manager Brian Gutekunst said, crediting assistant director of college scouting Patrick Moore with that.

“It’s been a while since we’ve been able to stay in certain packages with two inside ‘backers that we think can handle everything in run defense and the passing game. I think this really gives our defense a ton of flexibility.”

That first sentence would have been enough. Green Bay watched its base defense get trucked by the San Francisco 49ers in the playoffs two seasons ago because even with their big bodies on the field. Mike Pettine’s squad lacked the requisite athleticism to play with Kyle Shanahan’s wide zone runs, unable to run the alleys or cut off cutback lanes.

Last year under Joe Barry, the team finished 28th in run defense DVOA and 22nd overall. Under Pettine, the team became predictable by personnel about what coverages they’d be in and while they found the right balance late in 2020 of run vs. pass, the defense still hemorrhaged points in the first half against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in yet another NFC Championship Game defensive disaster.

That ‘20 team played more dime than any other defense in football, making it nearly impossible to force a team to play with one hand behind its back. Offenses could always run the ball if they wanted to.

If they had a linebacker who could run and cover, the team could play bigger without sacrificing coverage ability.

“I think you see in the league sometimes, you see certain defenses that don’t have to get out of certain personnel packages and that makes it really tough on offenses,” Gutekunst says.

Look no further than the team ending the Packers’ season. The San Francisco 49ers were second in the league in EPA/rush playing light boxes (six or fewer defenders). If you can defend the run in nickel, it makes passing that much more difficult.

The Packers allowed the fourth-highest EPA per rush playing six men in the box or fewer in 2021 on non-scramble runs. Coincidentally, Brandon Staley’s Chargers led the league by a mile in this stat, with Barry bringing a number of core ideals from Staley’s time with Barry coaching the Rams.

“In the NFL you’re going to get spread out, you’re going to be moved around, if you don’t understand what’s going on around you, you’re going to be a lost dog,” — Former Georgia QB D.J. Shockley

And against the pass, it’s not surprise the Bills and Buccaneers were league leaders in EPA/pass with five defensive backs, both teams with not one but two linebackers who can run and cover ground. Devin White makes up for below average coverage instincts by being a cannon blast as a blitzer, a trait Green Bay saw first-hand twice in 2020.

It’s not as though Green Bay struggled to defend opposing passers in nickel either with Barry’s group finishing 13th in EPA/play ahead of teams like the Rams who also want to live in a two-high safety, sub-package world defensively. The issue was feeling comfortable in nickel. Barry played a base front just 19.8% of the time, good for 26th in the league, but they also played Nickel 55.9% of the time, which may sound like a lot, but was only 22nd most because they played among the most dime in the league.

As Justis Mosqueda pointed out for Acme Packing Company, “nickel” personnel does not necessarily mean traditional fronts. A defense can play nickel from dime personnel, something both Pettine and Barry did as often as any team in the league the last few seasons.

This illustrates the point perfectly though: being able to play with five defensive backs vs. six is as much about who isn’t playing as it is who is.

"I think there's some things that we can do that we've farmed out in other spots, that you don't necessarily have to farm out," linebackers coach Kirk Olivadotti said after getting to see Walker in rookie camp.

To wit, Henry Black played 24.3% of snaps last season according to Football Outsiders, and once it became clear Rasul Douglas and Eric Stokes offered far more on the outside at cornerback, Barry started deploying Kevin King as a lurk defender. He finished the season playing 19%, 20%, 19% and 15% of snaps including the playoff game.

At Georgia last season, Walker played almost 300 coverage snaps in 2021 alone, and by far his highest-graded spot according to Pro Football Focus was in the slot where he played 90 snaps in 2021. Devin Lloyd, the second linebacker taken in the first round, played a scant 15 snaps split out. Walker played there more than twice as much as Nakobe Dean, the unanimous All-American who played next to him at Georgia.

He was the guy Georgia coaches trusted to be that overhang coverage defender. On a team of alien athletes, he was the queen on the chessboard. Part of that was because Dean was a heat-seeking missile, and another part stems from Walker’s struggle to diagnose in zone drops.

With his size and explosiveness, Walker is best manning up in covering or rushing the passer, which makes the middle of the field a difficult position to put him in for the Dawgs. Look at him here in coverage against first-round receiver Treylon Burks.

This is a role Campbell might have otherwise occupied, but it also might have been a backup safety like Black who we saw get worked by Justin Jefferson in Minnesota. Campbell finished top three in slot snaps among non-CBs with 189 snaps there according to PFF, accounting for almost 19% of all his snaps. Meanwhile, Krys Barnes played just 44 snaps in the slot, about 8% of his total defensive workload. On the flip side, that’s where Black played more than any other spot, with almost 36% of his snaps coming in the slot.

Campbell led all off-ball LB’s in Sports Info Solutions Points Saved metric and was also the highest graded true off-ball linebacker by PFF. But Campbell came to Green Bay on a promise he’d get to do more than just be a coverage specialist.

“The only way I will come is if you let me do this, and only this,” De’Vondre Campbell told the Packers last summer during his recruitment to Green Bay.

“I don’t want want to play SAM, MIKE and WILL. Yes, I can guard running backs and tight ends and wide receivers, but I don’t want to do it all day.”

Campbell made his expectations as clear as the diamonds in the Super Bowl ring the team hasn’t been able to snare since the 2010 season.

“I want to be a MIKE and I want to be just a MIKE.”

According to Campbell, Matt LaFleur, who used to talk to Campbell every day his rookie season in Atlanta, showed faith in him to take on the task. In the words of Campbell, “Opportunity is everything.”

Joe Barry, in his first year as Packers defensive coordinator, trusted Campbell, but still asked him to do the thing he proved so adept at in his career with the Falcons: cover. It’s not that the team wants Campbell to do what he does best any less, but rather they saw the value of him being able to play everywhere. What if they had two players who could do that, rather than, as Olivadotti says, farming those responsibilities out to backup players.

Green Bay didn’t have the horses last season, with Krys Barnes played next to Campbell on 48.8% of snaps and Oren Burks played another 19% of defensive snaps, nearly all o them in three off-ball linebacker looks.

Walker’s potential fit looks much like the player already on the roster doing his best Swiss Army knife job. Coaches and front office evaluators alike see Walker’s similarity to Campbell not as redundant, but as force multiplying.

“[Walker has] some similarities to (De’Vondre Campbell) and having two interchangeable pieces there, gives our defense so much flexibility kinda, maybe to stay in a certain personnel grouping without knowing how we’re gonna play you,” Barry explains.

And that muddies the picture for quarterbacks. Take it from a former quarterback D.J. Shockley who played in the NFL after a successful career at Georgia.

“The toughest thing is trying to identify who is who. Well, if De’Vondre is playing the Mike but he’s lined up on the edge and now you’ve got Quay Walker standing in the middle … for a quarterback trying to identify who is who, that’s a big thing. If you’ve got a protection on and you’re trying to count the bigs and the MIKE or you’re trying to count the big and another linebacker, that tells the lineman where to go. Well, if you’re not sure who is who, or where they’re coming from, or if they’re even going to blitz, that brings up a whole other issue.”

Take this play for example against Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. The Georgia front rotates late, bringing Walker down where he has to take on Evan Neal, a future top-10 pick at offensive tackle. He shows the ability to set the edge, shed the block and make a tackle. Even for as incredibly versatile as a player like Adrian Amos is, asking him to do this would be a fool’s errand. Asking Black or the like to do it would be malpractice.

Georgia plays some of the most complex defenses in college football and generally collegiate defenses have innovated beyond the NFL in finding ways to slow down spread offenses and RPO-heavy looks. The quarters match concepts Kirby Smart and Nick Saban run are in the same family with Vic Fangio, which should allow Walker to come in earlier than most linebackers with an understanding of what’s being asked of him.

That’s not proof Walker will dramatically alter the course of this defense, or even be a good player, but the messaging coming out of 1265 Lombardi signals a clear directional shift in how the team wants to play.

What’s more, with Campbell already playing at an All-Pro level, Walker only needs to be solid to amplify the positive plays Campbell already makes. Walker posted the third-fewest downgraded plays of any FBS linebacker that played 800+ snaps by PFF’s grading, which suggests at the very least he won’t hurt the team when he’s out there.

But the team sees so much more than that for him.

“You watch any Georgia football last year, it's hard not to see [Walker’s No.] 7 flying around making plays. He just has that ability. He has that skillset. And I think he has that mindset of what you want,” Barry says.  

Shockley echoes Barry, insisting Walker isn’t just a “do your job” player, but rather a playmaker capable of seeing beyond what is asked of him in the scheme to grasp how offenses might be stressing his leverage and responsibilities.

“There are a lot of guys who play the linebacker spot who ok you say you’re in Cover-3, you’ve got to run the flat, you’ve got hook-to-curl, that’s just what they do. But you watch Quay, yeah he’ll play the hook-to-curl but he’s also looking up saying ‘Is there anything coming behind me? Is there anything trying to stretch me so that hey maybe I can drop a little bit deeper. Or here’s a flat route and there’s nothing behind me so I can close on that.’ He has that great ability to understand what it’s like play in space as a linebacker,” Shockley says.

“Obviously in the NFL you’re going to get spread out, you’re going to be moved around, if you don’t understand what’s going on around you, you’re going to be a lost dog.”

Walker, for his part, models his game after these types of do-it-all playmakers.

“I always like to look at guys with similar to my body type like Jamie Collins, Dont’a Hightower, Fred Warner, Darius Leonard,” Walker said after he was drafted by the Packers on a conference call with reporters.

“I always just try to take what I can from them.”

That mix of players speaks to what Walker thinks he’s capable of being. Collins may be the best comparable to Walker, a player who can win as a pass rusher and in man coverage against tight ends. Hightower is a more downhill run defender and interior blitzer than we’ve seen from Walker and more than we’ve seen any player be with Barry’s defense. Warner and Leonard are incredibly instinctive in zone drops, one of the key places where Walker’s game lacks polish though it’s worth noting Mike Renner at PFF compared Walker to De’Vondre Campbell in his 2022 draft guide.

Walker brings the added benefit of experience playing with a linebacker around whom he filled in the gaps, allowing Dean to be a downhill maven as a blitzer and run defender.

“Everybody talks about Nakobe (Dean) being the catalyst for it, but I saw plenty of times when I saw [Walker] making calls, making adjustments, getting guys lined up,” explains Shockley.

“That tells you the guy is already smart as all get out that he understands what’s going on in this crazy defense.”

After a few days at rookie camp, Walker’s head will no doubt be spinning. If he knew his very presence represented such an enormous shift in franchise thinking, he could be forgiven for being overwhelmed. Again, none of this is proof Walker will be a superstar player, or even a good one, much less a worthy selection at No. 22 overall.

But to understand why Brian Gutekunst and this coaching staff coveted Walker, we must understand the intent and there’s no need to read between the lines on this one. They’re telling us what the goal is here: to play fundamentally differently than they have over the last half decade including under Barry last season. Walker provides the skillset to make that plan successful, but as of now we don’t know if either the plan or the player they’ve selected to help effect that plan actually works.

Still, the way this team talks about Walker, the strident self-assurance they have about how they want to alter their defensive path, points to a franchise secure in the risk it took to usher in a new version of Packers defense. Walker could be a future All-Pro or a future car washer, and either way his selection means something important for this team’s future. The quality of his play, at least at this point, is secondary to what his very selection tells us about how Matt LaFleur, Joe Barry and Brian Gutekunst want to play defense in 2022 and beyond.