The Athletic did a nice feature on him as part of their top 100 players countdown the other day:
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Mike Baugh and Tag Ribary were at the 1997 NFL Draft in New York celebrating the Seattle
Seahawks’ selection of cornerback Shawn Springs when they were interrupted by someone working for the league.
“You better get your headset on, your boss is trying to get ahold of you,” Baugh, a scouting assistant, says they were told at the time. Baugh was a bit confused. “What?” he replied. “We don’t pick for another hour.”
Incorrect. Baugh and Ribary, Seattle’s assistant director of pro personnel, were about to draft Walter Jones.
Their boss at the time was Randy Mueller, the Seahawks’ vice president of football operations who moments earlier had brokered one of the most significant draft-day deals in team history.
“Randy is
mad,” Baugh recalled, laughing. “He says, ‘Get your damn headphones on, we’re trading up
right now.’” Still taken aback, Baugh again replied: “What? We just traded up!”
The 1997 draft was regarded as a six-man class. Seattle believed the top four players were Ohio State left tackle Orlando Pace, USC defensive tackle Darrell Russell, Springs and Jones. But identifying the top players was the easiest part. For Seattle, acquiring the players would be tricky because of two potential roadblocks.
The first was the draft capital. Coming off an 8-8 season in 1996, Seattle had the 12th pick. In February 1997, Seattle traded quarterback Rick Mirer to the
Bears for the 11th pick. The plan was then to use those selections to jump from the top 12 to the top six.
“We had to do whatever we could to maneuver our picks,” Mueller said. But that led to the second potential issue: cash. “To have two picks in the top 10 was rare, let alone in the top six,” Mueller said. “It was going to cost a lot of money.”
The Seahawks in 1997 were undergoing an ownership change. Ken Behring, who had briefly tried to relocate the franchise to California in 1996, was on his way out. Billionaire Paul Allen, who wouldn’t officially purchase the team until the summer of 1997, was on the way in.
“I was dealing with both ownership groups because of the sale,” Mueller said. “Ken Behring was the outgoing owner who didn’t want to spend money. Paul, he was for it. It was always like I had to negotiate with the two ownership groups to make sure the money was covered.”
With Allen willing to foot the bill on the rookie contracts, Seattle on March 28 sent a haul, including the No. 11 pick, to Atlanta for the third overall selection. It was well-known that the Seahawks, desperate for a game-changing defender, would draft Springs.
The plan to draft Jones flew under the radar but it couldn’t have been more impactful. Jones would become a Seahawks icon and one of the game’s all-time great left tackles. Jones in 1999 was the franchise’s first offensive lineman to make the Pro Bowl and led Seattle to its first Super Bowl appearance in the 2005 season while proving to be one of the game’s best blockers. He allowed just 23 sacks in 180 regular-season starts. In 12 seasons with the Seahawks, Jones made nine Pro Bowls, four AP All-Pro teams and was named to the league’s All-2000s squad.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2014.
A franchise that at the time was on an eight-year playoff drought was able to change its fortunes by drafting Jones.
“It was giant,” Mueller said. “It helped us turn the corner as a playoff team.”
Jones’ decision to declare for the draft in January 1997 was somewhat of a surprise considering he had played all of one season at Florida State. Because of issues with grades, the Aliceville, Ala., native began his college career at Holmes Community College in Goodman, Miss. Jones was steered there by Florida State, which had unsuccessfully attempted to get him in the door straight out of high school.
Jones, as you might expect from a future Hall of Fame tackle, dominated at HCC, giving up one sack in two years. In 1994, he was voted region MVP, an award seldom given to a player in the trenches, and named the state’s best junior college player. The head coach at Holmes said Jones was the best offensive lineman he had ever seen. A 6-foot-5, 285-pound tackle who could run a 4.6 40-yard dash and squat 500 pounds, Jones had received just about every form of praise and every accolade possible on his way out of junior college. He was so athletic he took snaps at tight end and once caught a 40-yard screen pass.
Academic issues forced Jones to redshirt his first year at Florida State, in 1995. And by the time he was eligible to play, the Seminoles had two solid, veteran tackles in Todd Fordham and Tra Thomas. So, although Jones is listed as a starting left tackle for 12 games in 1996, he was actually part of a three-man rotation and would bounce back and forth between left and right tackle – sometimes in the same series.
“I never heard that in my life where you’re rotating a tackle in a game,” Jones said in a June 2020 interview with
NBC Sports Northwest.
Jones didn’t mind, though – he was happy to be on the field, competing for a national title against premier competition. But that context makes Mueller’s decision to pull the trigger on such a prospect look slightly more courageous, even though Jones was considered one of the draft’s best players.
Mueller had worked in Seattle’s front office since the early 1980s but was only a few years into his role as VP of football operations. “I think there’s an advantage to being young and what you don’t know, you don’t know,” said Mueller, who now has more than three decades of executive experience.
“I read a lot of criticism of that draft of Walt later on, where a lot of veteran-run teams were saying they couldn’t have pulled the trigger on a guy with one year at Florida State,” Mueller said. “I never even really thought about it. We saw what we saw, we trusted what we saw, and I ran with it. I was probably better off not knowing that it was that risky.”
What they saw was stellar left-tackle play from a prospect whose stock only rose as the pre-draft process went on. Seattle’s staff was sold immediately. Co-college scouting directors Phil Neri and Mike Allman were on board. Offensive line coach Howard Mudd would beat on Mueller’s door every other day with excitement.
“What we all saw was a guy with unbridled power and yet could dance like a bear,” Mueller said. “The combination is just perfect.”
Baugh recalls watching tape with Mudd and marveling at the way Jones handled Clemson defensive lineman Trevor Pryce, a stud in college who was a first-round pick in the ’97 NFL Draft. The Seminoles smoked the Tigers and Jones can be seen mauling defenders throughout the contest – including Pryce, who was drafted 28th overall, then made one All-Pro team and four Pro Bowls.
“I remember Howard saying this is the best knee-bending big man that he had ever seen,” said Baugh, now a national scout with the New Orleans Saints. Jones’ game film was invaluable to Baugh, then a young scout, for his potential growth as an evaluator.
“You have to know what it looks like,” Baugh said. “What does it look like when Jerry Rice transitions at the top of a route? What does it look like when Bruce Smith has hip flexion to bend a corner? It’s not just speed, it’s bend and pad level. Walter Jones, for me, was that training tape for what bend in the knees, hips and ankles would look like for a top-flight offensive lineman. And I still fall back on that. Walter was the standard of what an athletic big man can do.”
Jones in 12 games with the Seminoles allowed just one sack and was plenty ready for the NFL. But because Jones hadn’t
really gotten to experience a full-time role as a starting left tackle, he was still considering returning to Florida State, which had just gone 11-1 and lost the national championship to Florida. Then one day in the locker room with teammates he saw a pre-draft ranking that had him No. 2 at his position behind Pace, who finished fourth in the Heisman voting. That, along with regular calls from NFL agents, let Jones known how highly he was regarded in league circles.
Still partially undecided in January, Jones early in the school week attended one of his classes and was surprised to learn the professor had assigned a paper due that Friday. Jones had no interest in spending the week slapping together a paper and instead decided to go pro.
Jones was known as a mild-mannered player who played the left tackle position like an angry school bully.
“Walt’s a quiet man,” Mueller said. “Didn’t have a lot to say.”
At 6-5, 300 pounds, he ran a 4.63 40-yard dash in front of scouts and made Allman reportedly do a double-take looking at his stopwatch. ESPN’s Mel Kiper had Jones among the top 10 overall prospects. Tim Ruskell, the Buccaneers’ director of college scouting who would later become the GM of the Seahawks, said Jones was a “freakish” athlete for a big man. Longtime NFL executive Gil Brandt said Jones was the most phenomenal player he’d ever seen.
Pace was widely considered the better of the two draft-eligible tackles, but Baugh always felt the gap was small. “To the pros grading the tape you’re like, ‘Show me the difference,’” he said.
Seattle before the draft had a deal in place with the
Jets to move up from No. 12 to No. 6 as long as there wasn’t a player Jets coach Bill Parcells wanted in that slot. The morning of the draft, Mueller got a call from Parcells that their deal was off because the Jets were afraid of moving that far back and instead planned to trade with Tampa Bay, which picked eighth.
“But I don’t think Tampa at six knows who they want to pick,” Parcells told Mueller. “If I was you, I’d call Tampa.”
Mueller quickly phoned Bucs GM Rich McKay and brokered a new deal, actually giving up less than the original deal with the Jets. The Seahawks agreed to send pick Nos. 12 and 63 to the Bucs and hold on to their fifth-round pick – but that deal, too, was reliant on Tampa Bay not liking how the board looked when it was on the clock at No. 6.
“We didn’t think we were going to pull this off,” Mueller said. “I didn’t really believe it until it actually happened.”
Jones didn’t even think Seattle was all that interested. The Seahawks were among a handful of teams Jones visited before the draft and Mudd was the only staffer to interact with their future left tackle. “I don’t think I’m going there,” Jones told his agent after the visit, during which he watched just one play on film with Mudd before getting a quick tour of the building. “Wasn’t nobody there.”
Jones and Springs signed six- and seven-year deals, respectively, that cost Allen more than $10 million in signing bonus money. Although it would take a couple more years to end the team’s playoff drought, that April weekend in 1997 set the stage for a much-needed franchise pivot. Allman called successfully trading up to get Jones and Springs “dumb luck.” Mueller after the draft said, “Maybe the football gods were looking out for us.” Head coach Dennis Erickson felt their draft was perfectly executed. NFL pundits were sold as well: Much of the post-draft commentary applauded Seattle, which was thought to be in position to start contending after landing its ’97 class.
Thanks to a scouting staff that trusted its collective gut, Jones’ reluctance to write a criminology paper and Allen’s willingness to open his checkbook, the Seahawks in one day snagged a longtime starting cornerback in Springs, and in Jones, one of the best players in franchise history.
