Seattle beat New England 13-10 in week 1, and the most interesting thing about the game — for anyone who cares where the Seahawks' offense is going — happened on the ground, where they only gained 98 yards.

Rookie running back Jadarian Price, taken 32nd overall by Seattle in the 2026 draft (the final pick of Round 1), led the team in carries, rushing yards, and rushing EPA per attempt in his NFL debut. He was also the only Seattle back who finished the day above zero in EPA. That's a real first data point on a running-back room the Seahawks quietly reshuffled this offseason. It is also, at 10 carries, a very small first data point on a run game that has been below water for four straight years.

Both things are true, and the piece is about not pretending only one of them is.

What Price actually did in week 1

Seattle handed the ball off 21 times against New England. Price got 10 of those carries — 48% of the team's rushes — and turned them into 52 yards and +0.10 EPA per attempt (a total of +1.03 EPA on the ground). Every other back on the roster finished underwater:

Take Drew Lock's scramble out and Price was the entire positive-EPA contribution from the Seahawks' ground game. The two veteran backs behind him — George Holani (returning from Seattle's 2025 roster) and Emanuel Wilson (an offseason arrival from Green Bay) — combined for 10 carries and −4.0 EPA.

The individual carries are worth looking at, because "10 carries for 52 yards" doesn't tell you the shape. Price opened the game with a 13-yard first-down run on Seattle's first snap, added a 7-yard gain on his second carry, and popped a 12-yarder later in the first quarter. He also had a −3 in the third quarter and a stuffed 2nd-and-2 for no gain. His splits by down: 6 carries on first down at +0.01 EPA/att, 4 carries on second down at +0.24. Nothing on third down. In the fourth quarter, with Seattle trying to bleed the clock in a three-point game, he got 3 of the team's 5 carries.

That is a lead-back usage pattern. In one game.

Why he had the room to lead the backfield

The reason the reps were available is a roster reset. Kenneth Walker III, Seattle's leading rusher every year from 2022 to 2025, is on Kansas City's active roster in 2026. Walker's Seattle production, year by year:

Walker was Seattle's volume back and never posted a positive EPA/att season doing it. Zach Charbonnet, the 2023 second-round pick who split the 2025 backfield with Walker (190 carries, 750 yards, −0.006 EPA/att as Seattle's RB2), opened 2026 on the reserve list. Between them, that's 476 carries from 2025 that had to go somewhere.

Week 1 is a small sample of where. But it's a real one: Price got twice as many touches as anyone else on the roster in a one-score game.

The number the rookie was handed

Seattle's team rushing EPA per play against New England was −0.061 across all 21 carries. That is worse — narrowly — than each of the last three completed seasons:

Four straight seasons of negative rush EPA, and week 1 of the fifth opened in the same neighborhood. This is the honest part of the Price story: even in a game where the rookie individually cleared zero, the team rushing number didn't, because Holani and Wilson dragged the aggregate back down. And the sample sizes aren't comparable — 21 carries against a single opponent versus 400-600 across a full season — so it would be wrong to call week 1 "worse than 2024." It would be equally wrong to pretend +0.10 EPA/att on 10 carries closes a gap that has stood for four seasons.

What week 1 established, and only what it established: Price handled the volume, Price cleared zero on the volume he handled, and no one else did.

What I'd watch, and what I wouldn't claim yet

Sample-size caveats aside, some things about this backfield are legible now and some aren't.

Legible: Price is being used as a lead back, at least when Charbonnet is on RES. Holani and Wilson are the change-of-pace and short-yardage complements, not the guys the offense is built around. Seattle called 21 designed runs in a 13-10 win — Klint Kubiak's offense is going to keep asking the position for meaningful volume.

Not legible: whether the rookie is actually better than the veterans he out-produced in week 1. Holani had 27 carries at −0.40 EPA/att for Seattle in 2025 — small enough to be noise then, small enough now — and Wilson's 2 carries are a rounding error. It would be tempting to write "Price is already better than what Seattle had," and I'd want three or four more games before I said that with a straight face.

Also not legible: whether any of this reverses the four-year rushing trend. My honest read is that a rookie back with a positive first game is a good sign inside a bad run game, not a fix for it — Seattle's rush EPA has been negative in every season Walker was the lead back, which suggests the problem is at least partly upstream of who's carrying the ball. If the Seahawks are still at −0.05 in rush EPA/play in November with Price getting 15 carries a week, we'll have learned that the reset didn't solve it. If they're at +0.02, we'll have learned something genuinely new.

Week 1 didn't settle either question. It just told us who's getting the chances to answer it.