Herschel Walker

Herschel Walker (born March 3, 1962 in Wrightsville, Georgia) was a professional American football player in the United States Football League and later, the National Football League.

Career Overview

If Walker's USFL and NFL numbers are combined, he ranks as one of the most productive professional football runners in history. Many are reluctant to do this, however, because of the disagreement as to whether the level of play of the USFL was in any way comparable to that of the NFL.

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Even without taking his USFL numbers into account, his NFL stats are exceptionall high. In his 12 NFL seasons, Walker gained 8, 225 rushing yards, 4,859 recieving yards, and 5,084 kickoff return yards. This gave him an impressive 18,168 totall combined net yards, ranking him high among the NFL's top 20 all time leaders in that catagory at the time of his retirement.

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Even so, most football experts rank Walker's professional career as something of a disappointment. This must be due to the high, perhaps unrealistic expectations that were placed upon him due to his college career and the scrutiny which was entailed by so much being traded for him by the Vikings. Some observers, however, claim that Walker was at least in part a victim of the package of rules changes the NFL had adopted in the spring of 1978, which were widely assumed to discourage offenses from running (rather than passing) most of the time; in addition, the NFL teams on which Walker played seldom used the I-formation, out of which Walker ran so successfully at Georgia.

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