What P.J. Walker gives the Seahawks at QB

Seahawks add a QB who beat the 49ers last year, will he push Sam Howell as the backup? Seaside Joe 1924

It was no secret that the Seattle Seahawks needed to add another quarterback prior to training camp and the preseason. Until Roger Goodell gets his wish of eliminating all preseason, regular season games, and non-championship playoff games, leaving only the AFC and NFC title games+Super Bowl left for premium ratings, teams will need at least three quarterbacks in training camp.

Even if the Seahawks wish to give 100% of the preseason reps to Sam Howell, they can’t guarantee that he won’t get hurt and need to come out of the game. To preserve Geno Smith for a regular season in which there will be absolutely no quarterback controversy whatsoever, Mike Macdonald needed a third QB to soak up camp and preseason snaps behind those two, which is what led the team to signing P.J. Walker on Thursday.

Finally, Seattle has a quarterback who beat the 49ers last season.

P.J. Walker

I don’t know who to compare Walker to, but in Seahawks lore maybe he’s a lesser version of Seneca Wallace. Both quarterbacks are undersized at 5’11, but Wallace came into the NFL with at least a little bit of cred as a fourth round pick and his first four seasons were somewhat compelling: The Seahawks went 5-7 in his 12 starts and he threw 22 touchdowns with 12 interceptions.

Walker has played four seasons in the NFL after going undrafted out of Temple in 2018 and first playing in the XFL in 2020, but he has thrown only six touchdowns against 16 interceptions, in addition to eight fumbles.

Last year, Walker made two starts, including one against Seattle and a 19-17 win over the 49ers that was thanks to Cleveland’s defense and a missed kick by San Francisco’s rookie kicker, but he had one touchdown and five interceptions over the three games in which he played extensively.

Dating back to when the Seahawks moved to the NFC in 2002, Walker’s career passer rating of 60.0 is the fifth-worst in the NFL among all quarterbacks with at least 300 career attempts. Only Mike McMahon, Andrew Walter, Ken Dorsey, and DeShone Kizer were worse. Dorsey, Kizer, and Walker all played with the Browns.

Actually, the ninth worst passer rating in the era belongs to Brady Quinn, the 12th-worst is Bruce Gradkowski. The list goes on and on and on for Cleveland, and Johnny Manziel’s only reprieve is that he didn’t throw enough passes to qualify.

(The only Seahawks on the list in the bottom-30 are Dilfer and Charlie Frye, both quarterbacks who also played for the Browns.)

Can P.J. Walker beat Sam Howell?

The next most logical question is whether or not Walker has a chance to out-play Sam Howell for Seattle’s backup quarterback position and despite how poorly his career has played out to this point, I don’t see how it’s not at least a little bit possible. Anyone who is with a team has a chance to prove himself as being worthy to stay on the team, Walker should be no different.

If Geno Smith can become an NFL starter at 32, why can’t Walker become an NFL backup at 29?

This week, I wrote about how Sam Howell could be at an advantage by being the QB2 headed into the season because he’ll get to observe what goes right and what doesn’t in the opening stages of the Ryan Grubb install. I intended to make a few points clear in that post: a) Geno Smith is the starter, b) Geno could excel in the new offense, c) I hope he does, d) Howell’s probably better off as a backup in Seattle than where he was last year as a sitting duck on the Moons.

The post was not actually anti-Geno or pro-Howell, it was merely an observation of the current Seahawks quarterback situation as it is: Geno is at an advantage by being the starter and Howell is at an advantage by being the next man up if Seattle needs to go to their backup option at any point. At least, that’s my feeling on it before camp. Both quarterbacks have advantages and disadvantages going into the season and it does not matter to me which one of them has success with Grubb as long as one of them has success with Grubb.

However, maybe one additional advantage for Geno is that he doesn’t have to look over his shoulder at Walker like Howell might need to.

Yes, Howell started an entire season last year with an NFL team and Walker has never shown that he can play in the league at all, but nobody can say for sure yet if Howell has a clear future in the pros or if he’ll be a fit for Seattle. A very early observation from ESPN’s Brady Henderson is that Geno is doing better so far:

Through two years in the NFL, all we know about Howell is that he was a fifth round pick (despite the presence of players like Tom Brady and Brock Purdy, the number of day three quarterbacks who became regular starters is still a very, very short list), that he led the NFL in interceptions last year, and that the Moons were willing to trade him for an inconsequential return despite how cheap he is for the next two seasons.

That’s not anti-Howell, that’s pro-reality. Of all the quarterbacks drafted on day three since 2012, Howell’s 22 career touchdown passes already ranks fourth behind Gardner Minshew (59), Purdy (44), and Trevor Siemian (44).

There isn’t much in Howell’s favor yet, he has EVERYTHING to prove in the future before any expectation that Seattle has a developmental quarterback who they can actually develop into the type of player people say is “in the top-10” for the position. It doesn’t mean that P.J. Walker is good either, but several different coaches seem to think that he’s a worthy quarterback to have around the building because he has signed with the Panthers and Browns despite never really playing good ball in the NFL.

This happened less than two years ago:

And last year, Browns head coach Kevin Stefanski preferred Walker to fifth round pick Dorian Thompson-Robinson.

I do not think that P.J. Walker will be on the Seahawks after August unless it is on the practice squad. However, I don’t think anyone could rule it out, including Seattle’s coaching staff and front office. He should have a real chance to compete and just like Geno has to look over his shoulder, so too does Howell. That’s the nature of the NFL most of the time to most players.

Adding a third quarterback was inevitable. Nothing else about Seattle’s quarterback room after 2024 seems to obvious.