The Pittsburgh Steelers were decimated by injuries to their inside linebacker room last season, with Cole Holcomb and Kwon Alexander both suffering season-ending injuries. That led the Steelers to rely on depth pieces, and one of them included practice squad call-up Mykal Walker. Walker played in eight games with five starts and was even Pittsburgh’s green dot linebacker for part of the season. Walker wasn’t expected to play the role that he had, but there were some struggles, as he was a liability in pass coverage and eventually lost snaps to Myles Jack. During an interview on the Bring The Juice podcast, Walker said that in his exit meeting with the Steelers, Mike Tomlin said the team would do business with him, but the expectation was that Walker would need to play better.
“After every year, you do exit meetings. So I go in there with Mike [Tomlin], and he’s like, ‘We really appreciate you, you came in here on a short leash. Obviously, if you come back, I would love to do business with you. If you do come back, we expect you to play better, but we’d love to do business with you in the future.’ I was like ok, cool, that’s fair. You know, obviously, I didn’t have the best season I had. It was cool that he acknowledged it and said he appreciated the work I put in.”
It was a tough situation for Mykal Walker, thrust into a starting role for a team competing for a playoff berth despite not being super familiar with the team and organization. He said in his first game, a 13-10 loss to the Cleveland Browns, there was a play called that he didn’t even know yet, and the other linebackers had to tell him what to do. While he was a veteran who had started 20 games with the Atlanta Falcons before his stint in Pittsburgh, he was joining a new organization with new terminology and a different scheme, and it was tough for Walker to learn on the fly to then step into a key role.
It’s reasonable that Tomlin would want a better version of Walker if he returned, and Walker acknowledged that the Steelers didn’t get his best football. However, circumstances played a big part in that, and it can’t entirely be held against him that he struggled, although Jack came in off the street and wound up playing better down the stretch.
Pittsburgh opted not to bring Mykal Walker back, instead signing Patrick Queen and drafting Payton Wilson. Walker signed with the Washington Commanders, reuniting him with the coach that drafted him in Dan Quinn. This season, Walker has played in all 13 games in a depth role, and while things didn’t go as he hoped in Pittsburgh, it seems as if he’s appreciative of his time with the Steelers, and it’s good to see him still making an impact in the NFL.
