When Kenneth Walker III left for the Kansas City Chiefs in free agency, the Seattle Seahawks needed an immediate solution for Sam Darnold’s offense, coming off the Super Bowl LX win. The 32nd overall pick from the 2026 NFL Draft brought them Notre Dame’s running back Jadarian Price, and day one of the OTAs has now given the first on-field look at his upside. Price’s standout moment came during a 7-on-7 drill, where Seattle Sports’ Cameron Van Til went as far as calling the rookie the “highlight of the day.”

“During a 7-on-7 session, Price ran a route out of the backfield, raced past linebacker Chazz Surratt, and hauled in a pass from backup quarterback Drew Lock for a big gain down the sideline,” Van Til wrote.

Van Til also noted why the catch matters. Across three seasons at Notre Dame, Price only hauled in 15 catches for 162 yards and 3 touchdowns, which raised questions about what he could give a quarterback out of the backfield. His run game was never in any question; he has 1,692 rushing yards and 21 touchdowns to show for that. But the pass-catching reps weren’t enough to evaluate him.

The Seahawks can really use the upside as well. Zach Charbonnet tore his ACL in the playoffs and had to undergo surgery in February. Head coach Mike Macdonald confirmed Tuesday that both Charbonnet and Kenny McIntosh (who tore his ACL last training camp) are still on their own recovery timelines with no clear return date.

Right now, the run game is still a bit of an unknown for Sam Darnold. But if Price grows into a reliable back, it changes everything – stacking the box gets a lot riskier when Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Cooper Kupp, Rashid Shaheed, and Elijah Arroyo are all out there.

ESPN’s senior fantasy football and NFL writer Mike Clay has projected Price to log 915 rushing yards and eight touchdowns in 2026 – second among all rookies this year, and more than Charbonnet’s career-best 730 rushing yards from last season. That’s what the backfield looks like if Price develops on schedule.

Jadarian Price catching passes out of the backfield in 7-on-7 drills brings another upside. Kenneth Walker III was electric as a runner and even won the Super Bowl MVP. But he was never much of a receiving threat, finishing with 31 catches for 282 yards and no touchdowns last season. If Price can add that dimension, it gives Darnold a more balanced outlet and makes the offense more unpredictable.

Whether Price holds up in full pads is a different question, one which will be answered at the training camps. In the meantime, the culture coach Macdonald is building for the team adds another layer to their 2026 season goals.

Mike MacDonald’s vision: “Run it forward”

When the Seahawks opened their first OTA on May 26th, 84 of Seattle’s 91 players showed up on the rainy day. That number is the backdrop for everything else, including Jadarian Price’s debut, and Mike Macdonald has a phrase for where this is headed.

“We’re using the term, we want to run it forward, ‘it’ meaning our process and who we are. I think this is going to be a conversation that we’re going to talk about consistently,” Macdonald said after day 1. “I don’t think it’s a one-and-done type of conversation. Really, it’s just how we talk about, how we operate all the time.”

For a defending Super Bowl champion team with most of its roster intact, it would’ve been easy to treat the OTAs like a formality and flip the switch in September. But that’s not what Mike Macdonald has been building over the past two years. The near-perfect OTA attendance speaks to that buy-in, and as veteran defensive tackle Byron Murphy II put it, the standard hasn’t shifted just because they’ve already won once.

“We accomplished a lot last season, but that’s behind us now,” Murphy admitted. “So we’ve got to start back from the bottom, work our way back up to the top to get back to another Super Bowl. We’ve got to start from scratch. We should ask ourselves, ‘What are the things we can improve on?’”

Jadarian Price stepped into that mentality on day one and made a highlight play. Sam Darnold now has a backfield worth building around, and the Kenneth Walker question seems to have answered itself for now.