The two Georgia Bulldogs played 38 games together as college teammates, pushing each other to become draft classmates in 2022. They were two of 15 Bulldogs drafted into the NFL that season, and they’ll be reuniting with former Bulldogs Eric Stokes and Brock Bowers in Las Vegas, who were also first-round picks.
While Dean and Walker spent an exponential amount of time together commanding the Bulldogs defense, they also developed a close relationship as friends. The two were roommates on road trips, with their time spent off the field directly translating over to making Georgia’s defense the most stifling unit in the nation – allowing 10.2 points a game to opposing teams their last season on campus.
“The conversations that we’ll have, those are some of my favorite memories of Quay,” said Dean on Walker as his college teammate. “I don’t know if I ever even told him but he was the one who kind of helped me implement my routine of preparing for a team on a week. We used to watch film together post-practice in college. We’d watch a game or a hour or two of film after practice almost every other day.”
When Walker was asked to reflect on Dean as a college teammate, the hours of film sessions equally stood out to him.
“I took so much, he’s so smart,” said Walker. “Honestly just the way he work, it’s kind of a competition between me and him but it doesn’t bring any type of envy. Just the love that I have for him and just the way we both go about things.
“We’d go to the grab and go at UGA, we’ll grab our food and go straight into the meeting room immediately and start watching film,” he continued. “I would just tell him things that I see, whatever the tendencies may be from this tackle, from this guard, whether we can get run or pass, whatever the case may be I shared that with him and he would share it with me and we just click off each other like that.