Walker walks, and Bills move on

By Anthony Bialy  |   Tuesday, July 31, 2007  |  Comments( 26 )

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I'm thankful I never have to write about Darwin Walker again, just as all Bills followers are pleased they don't have to discuss his possible future in Buffalo anymore. The Walker saga ended when the Bills sent the surly defender to Chicago on Sunday, meaning Buffalo fans hopefully won't have to hear his name until the Bills/Bears contest in 2010. An excruciating ordeal longer than Brett Favre's annual retirement contemplation process is over, and if the Bills still face troubling questions about the defensive line's interior, at least they know who will be in the pen this season.

Nobody was happy with the weak tackle play in 2006, but would Walker have improved the situation? He appears to be a capable pass rusher, having accumulated 27½ sacks over his seven seasons. That includes six quarterback takedowns last season; however, that stat must be qualified by noting half of those were in one game against the Cowboys, where he toppled Drew Bledsoe three times.

Many sports analysts think that an asterisk should accompany Barry Bonds' home run total when he breaks the record, and the same punctuation mark should be used next to the sack total of any NFL defender who brought down Bledsoe, a man who can never visit the Arctic Circle for fear that he'll be run over by a speeding glacier. The sacked-Bledsoe asterisk should be in a larger typeface than the Bonds one, too.

More important than discussion about Walker's pass-rushing proficiency is the fact that the Bills are looking for run defenders in the interior. Walker's talents seem to be more conducive to evading pass blockers than taking on charging rushing blockers. He fits the prototype Buffalo seeks for its D-tackles, but that doesn't necessarily mean he would have enhanced the run defense, as his elusiveness has to be balanced against his sturdiness.

And I don't want to hear about how the Bills knew he wanted to renegotiate. Walker was under contract when he was traded, and he was obligated to play the final two years of the deal. His signature was on it, so why should he get to arbitrarily demand to squirm free of the contract and claim he merits more? I want a Mini Cooper and a walk-in humidor, but that doesn't mean I either deserve or am entitled to those things. His unwillingness to live up to the terms of a document he signed indicated that he may have ended up being a potential selfish headache as a Bill, exactly the opposite of the sort of team member General Manager Marv Levy has attempted to keep in Buffalo.

The good news for the Bills is that the personnel questions are over, and they now know who will be the defensive tackles when the season begins. On the negative side, that's disconcerting when one considers that they're the same group that barely rose to the level of functional through last season.

The one best hope to trigger collective improvement is John McCargo, who lost much of 2006 to his foot injury. As good as Levy's first class played in their rookie seasons, imagine how the group could have been even more outstanding if McCargo along with cornerback Ashton Youboty didn't miss large portions of the year. More urgently than they need Youboty to develop, the Bills are banking on McCargo bringing explosive quickness and just a little bulk to the position.

So, Larry Tripplett and Kyle Williams are currently listed as starters on the depth chart, with McCargo credited as Tripplett's backup and the oft-attacked Tim Anderson behind Williams. Of course, it's going to be a rotation, and McCargo could conceivably be big enough to play either position, but he still has to stay healthy and live up to his draft spot while Tripplett has to prove he wasn't merely the lucky beneficiary of playing beside stellar Indianapolis defensive teammates. Although Williams played as well as could be hoped last year, the group still has much to collectively prove. But that doesn't mean Walker's presence would have fixed everything or even some things.

And this trade brings at least some meager benefits to the Bills. As things turned out, Levy dumped a hobbled Takeo Spikes and a marginal Kelly Holcomb while simultaneously giving the Bills a little future financial wiggle room by discarding their salaries. In addition to the seventh-round pick they got from the Eagles in the first trade, the Bills also got a conditional fifth-rounder in next year's draft from the Bears for Walker, a little better than the sixth-round pick they would have received had he reverted to the Eagles.

Coincidentally, that's the round where Buffalo picked up Williams, the tackle who had the best '06 of the group. Not that solid starters regularly pop up later in the draft, but at this point it's preferable to have the pick and add a possible contributor next April rather than overpay the decent player who didn't really want to be a Bill.

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CommentsComments: 26  |  Sign Up  View all comments
No.1
jw		06:20 AM
08/01/2007
what do you mean we won't hear walker's name until 2010? are you saying that the bills won't play the bears in the superbowl this ...
No.2
ddd		06:33 AM
08/01/2007
Let's please stop talking about Darwin Walker. He was another over-rated player who wanted to cash in and the Bills were not ...
No.3
Cage		06:50 AM
08/01/2007
I think that one of the unknowns in evaluating the Walker situation is that we never clearly understood what he wanted? A new ...
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